The Scarlet Letters Read online

  The class discussion was of the superiority of monotheism, as devised by Jews, Moslems and, best of all, Christians, to the worship of a more populated Olympus by pagan rites.

  “But why, sir?” Ambrose wanted to know. “Might it not be better to have several gods rather than just one? Is there anyone of our faith wiser than Socrates? Or Cicero? Or even Augustus Caesar?”

  “But from the very multitude of pagan deities, Vollard, must one not infer that they have different personalities? Different qualities? If they were all the same, they would have to be one, would they not? And if they are different they cannot all be perfect; only one can be that. Which means that all but one would be imperfect. And imperfection implies faults. Why should we worship a god with faults? One, for example, who would turn a maiden into a tree for resisting his lust?”

  The headmaster nodded to the class as if to invite the titters that respectfully followed, and turned back to his notes as if he had coped with Ambrose’s interruption. But he hadn’t.

  “But it seems to me, sir, that this one God had faults.”

  “How do you mean, Vollard?” The tone was graver now. “And be careful in how you state it. You mustn’t tread lightly on the faith of others.”

  “I can only say what I think, sir. Is a god perfect—is he even very good—if he created organisms that could only survive by eating each other?”

  Dr. Close frowned. But he wished to keep at least the appearance of a free discussion alive. “There are things that pass our understanding, Vollard. Their meaning may not be divulged in this lifetime.”

  “But this God, sir, not only created men who had to kill to live. He wants them to praise him and magnify him forever! If a man did that, wouldn’t we call him a pompous ass?”

  “That will be all, Vollard. We have heard enough from you. More than enough. I’ll see you after class. And now let me hear from some of the rest of you.”

  A much less adventuresome discussion followed this.

  Somewhat to Ambrose’s surprise, but not at all to the alleviation of his new doubts, the headmaster, normally so high and distant with the boys, accorded him two long individual sessions in which he mildly and tediously lectured him on Christian orthodoxy. He had, after all, a soul to save. But Ambrose was obdurate. He stoutly declined to consider being confirmed in the church and refused even to soft-pedal his efforts to spread his atheism among his classmates.

  This resulted not in his being expelled, but in his being sent home for a term.

  “I am running a church school, Vollard,” the headmaster explained, with a sad but dismissing shake of his head. “And I cannot tolerate the presence here of an active proselytizer of what we used to call heresy. It is my hope and belief that when our boys have graduated and are turned out in the world, their faith will be strong enough to withstand arguments such as yours. But while they are young and impressionable I deem it my duty to protect them from confusing elements. If after you have talked to your parents and reflected on my words, and have taken a more enlightened attitude towards our faith, you will be welcome back at school.”

  “You needn’t worry, sir. I won’t bother you again. I’ll never come back here.”

  The headmaster sighed but made no answer, and Ambrose was sent home that very day. He was given no further opportunity to corrupt his classmates.

  At home his suspension caused less of a scene than he had expected. His parents seemed put out but hardly surprised. His father confined himself to a few gruff and reproving remarks, and it was quickly arranged that he should be enrolled in a private day school—the new popularity of boarding institutions with affluent parents who dreaded the effect of city streets on their boys had depleted the ranks of the old urban academies and caused them to welcome even heretical recruits. Fanny Vollard, however, had a few matters to settle with her disappointing younger son, and she subjected him to a quiet lecture in her boudoir.

  “I don’t understand you, Ambrose. And I don’t think I ever really have. You and Bertha have never shown me half the love and affection that Russell and Rosebud have. Perhaps I don’t deserve it. Who knows? But I am your mother, and it will always be my duty, however painful, to point out to you any wrong road you are taking. I have, of course, read carefully your headmaster’s report. I see that you have prided yourself as a free thinker among the benighted, in which class I am sure you include your parents as well as the faculty of Chelton School. You think you are brave and bold and forward thinking. But in fact you are just another impudent boy determined to bring down anyone or anything that threatens to be higher or bigger than yourself. If you fail you will look a fool, and if you succeed—which God forbid—you will simply find yourself pinned in the wreckage.”

  The terrible thing about Fanny was that she never thought of children as children. The moment they offended her they were just as much adults as herself, and she struck back with every arrow in her quiver. Mortals were divided into her friends and her enemies, and once she had spotted a child as among the latter, she had no more mercy on him than for a pickpocket in the street.

  Ambrose trembled a bit at the impact of her hostility, but he soon rallied his inner forces. He was learning that if he was to lead his life without any significant parental love, he might also dispose with worrying unduly about parental opposition. He never bothered to explain his rejection of orthodoxy to his mother—indeed he hardly bothered to explain it to himself; he knew that her mind was closed to argument, and for the next year, until he entered Columbia College, he lived with his parents in a kind of armed truce. This was not difficult with two persons as self-absorbed as Elias and Fanny, particularly as the routine of their domestic life was as fixed as the rotation of the planets. He had only to avoid any open friction, which, with a father who at home passed the greater part of his time alone in his study, the silence of which was broken only by the occasional clink of decanters, and with a mother intent upon preserving her body from the least exhaustion, was no great task. And his mornings were all spent in class and his afternoons in the school gym.

  It helped, too, that Stuffy and Rosebud were both now married and away from home. Ambrose’s family life, and even social life, were mostly reduced to Bertha, on whom her mother had largely given up after her adamant refusal to “come out” or even to attend any debutante parties. Bertha, stout, plain and emphatic, was allowed to come and go pretty much as she pleased. She adored Ambrose, and her passionate espousal of his side in any family dispute contributed to the comparative silence in which meals at the Vollards were held. And when, in Ambrose’s first year at Columbia, he came home drunk one night and encountered his shocked mother in a corridor, it was Bertha who quieted the ensuing furor by suggesting that he move to a college dormitory, which the very next day he did.

  He had chosen Columbia because he had no wish to resume his old acquaintance with Chelton classmates at Yale or Harvard. The Chelton values, which he now associated with the parental ones, he had repudiated. As an angry young man he cultivated the radical elements of his new institution, inveighed against the trusts and found President Taft a sad step backwards after the great Teddy. But his political liberalism was tempered by moods of deep depression when nothing seemed really worth fighting for, when the world seemed a flourishing garden only for such noodles as Stuffy and Rosebud, and a desert for the likes of him. Then he would turn away from his dogmatic and obstreperous new friends and solace himself alone in his room with whiskey. He had no opportunity to travel or even to wine and dine expensively; his father, fearful that he would give his money to some leftist cause, kept him on a spare allowance.

  But he had one salvation; he read. As with his hero, Teddy Roosevelt, reading with him was a “disease.” He reveled in the English poets, especially Byron and Shelley, whose fire and cynicism he tried to emulate; he delighted in the madness of Dostoyevsky, the oratory of Milton’s Satan, and the violence of Ahab in the newly appreciated Moby-Dick. He wrote stories himself, about evil men who preyed on
dolts, women who betrayed their lovers, bankers who degenerated into vampires, and clergymen who dwindled into sheep. He sent them to magazine editors who invariably rejected them, though one more percipient reader commented on the vigor of his style and suggested that he try his hand at more neutral subject matter. “For neutral read neuter,” he snorted in disgust.

  It was Bertha who promoted the idea of his going to law school. She was just as antagonistic to the old world as he was, but more objective. And she was less wrapped up in Bertha than he was in Ambrose. She was capable of putting herself in his shoes while preserving her own outlook. But then she loved him, and he, as yet, loved no one.

  “Male and female twins aren’t really twins, you know,” she told him one day as they lunched in a Broadway café, which they frequently did now that she was enrolled in Barnard. “Obviously they can’t resemble each other in all respects. Vive la difference! as the French say, though I’m not sure what good it’s done me. But the point is that you’ve got a bigger brain than I do. And a bigger spirit, a bigger future. Your trouble is that you don’t know what to do with it. You need time to decide. And the classic way to spend that time is in law school. For whatever you ultimately decide on, a law degree will be a bonus. Except perhaps in medicine, but I don’t see you becoming a doctor.”

  Of course he had thought of this. But now she helped it to take root. “Will Papa stake me to it?” he wondered.

  “Leave that to me!”

  In fact she had already crossed that bridge, by persuading her parents that the study of law was really the study of law and order and might have a mollifying effect on their wide-eyed son.

  Which it did. Or rather which Professor Gideon Gregg did. He was a small dry neat bald sexagenarian, with a voice so low that he lectured through an amplifier, who had devoted his life to the study and teaching of contract law, with rare but well-paid appearances in court as an expert witness to edify the bench. He was supposed to have thus answered a judge’s question as to who was the foremost authority in his field: “I believe, your honor, that Mr. Williston at Harvard is generally deemed the second.” Unlike many law professors he disdained the barking approach; he was invariably kind and courteous to his students, and was notorious, when questioning one of them in class, for offering broad hints as to the correct answer. He wanted to believe that every man or woman seated before him was a natural lawyer, but he nonetheless had a keen eye for a real talent, and when he found a paper of Ambrose’s on unilateral contracts unusually perspicacious, he called him into his office and offered him on the spot a job assisting him in revising an edition of his famous casebook. It was, of course, quite a load to take on in addition to Ambrose’s class work, but as the stipend was generous, thanks to Gregg’s soft heart, and as the Vollard allowance, from a still doubting father, was still on the stingy side, he jumped at the chance.

  The close relationship that ensued between master and apprentice gave Ambrose his first real purpose and incentive in life. He came to see his wonderful little mentor as an inspired artist who could use words as his tools to clamp the golden wires of civility around the dark chaos of life. Offer and acceptance, good faith and bad, the meeting or non-meeting of minds, consideration and specific performance, breach and damages—the areas of contractual obligation opened up to him like a massive clearing in a dense dark threatening jungle, and the beauty of Gideon Gregg’s prose in the essay portions of his casebook, the tight flashing mesh of his Anglo-Saxon short words and his Latinized long ones, seamlessly concise and pregnant with meaning, provided Ambrose with a kind of creed, or art, or even faith that might be almost enough to live on.

  By the middle of his second year at law school Ambrose had completed his work on the casebook, which was just as well, as he had accepted, at the professor’s strong urging, an editorship on the Law Journal that would henceforth preempt his every spare moment.

  “Whatever else happens to me in life, sir,” he told his mentor, “I know now that I will always be a lawyer.”

  Gregg stared at him in astonishment. “Great Scott, my boy, was there ever a doubt in your mind about that? What the devil else did you come to law school for?”

  “Oh, I heard it was a good preparation for almost everything.”

  “It’s a good preparation for the practice of law, that’s what it is. And if ever I saw a born attorney, it’s you, my boy. If you do anything else, you’re a fool, and if you’re that it’s time I retired. For if I’m wrong on that, I’m wrong on everything.”

  “But is it necessary to practice, sir? Couldn’t I be a teacher like you and the writer of treatises?”

  Gregg was silent for a moment, and his face expressed the seriousness of his thought. “You could, yes. But I think your particular forte will be for an active practice. I see you as a fighter, my boy. Nor do I for a minute minimize that. The judge, the law professor, the treatise writer and the practicing lawyer are all equally indispensable to our sacred profession. The law comes out of our words: words penned for books and treatises in sober reflection, words used less temperately in briefs and oral argument, words chosen wisely in opinions or dramatically in classrooms, it’s all the same game!”

  Ambrose had another talk with the professor about his future a year later, in the spring before his graduation.

  “Am I not correct, Ambrose, in supposing that Charles de Peyster is a relative of yours?”

  “He’s my uncle, sir. My mother’s brother.”

  “May I suggest, then, that you apply to his firm for a position? It’s one of the first, perhaps the best, of the great corporation law firms of our city. I have had the occasion to testify for them in a number of cases. They do fine work.”

  “But I’m afraid, sir, I’ve been rather remiss in my family duties. I have seen my uncle only at Christmas or birthday gatherings. And I’m afraid he may have formed an unfavorable opinion of me when I dropped out of Chelton.”

  “Pish tush, that water’s long under the bridge. You’ll find he’ll take a very different view of you when he hears my recommendation. And that he is certainly going to have!”

  2

  UNCLE CHARLEY HAD MANY of the de Peyster characteristics: he was grave of demeanor, deeply conservative in his attitudes—domestic, political and economic—darkly and faultlessly dressed, dignified in bearing, measured of speech. But he differed drastically from his sister Fanny in that he cut a figure of considerable importance in the social and business worlds and cared about cutting such a figure. For all his disdain of an increasingly multiracial and multicultural New York and what he considered its vulgar innovations, for all his reluctance to associate with Irish Catholics or Jews, he studied the changes in his world with care and caution and learned precisely what compromises were required for a successful navigator of such turbulent water and just when hoisting the de Peyster flag could be a signal of triumph and when dipping it could be a judicious surrender. His mind and legal abilities, though keen enough, were not of the high caliber to have brought him by themselves to eminence at the bar, but when added to his impressive appearance, his high social connections and his smooth assurance of attracting major clients, the combination carried him to the senior partnership in Dallas, Kaye & de Peyster that he had never doubted would one day be his. Majestic but gracious, he inspired in the roughest of rough diamonds among the firm’s large and variegated clientele something like the awe which a Spanish conquistador might have instilled in a native Aztec or Inca.

  He understood at once the value of Professor Gregg’s recommendation of his nephew; it confirmed an unspoken suspicion on his part that his sister was too self-centered to have any true comprehension of an even mildly rebellious child. He had heard her complaints about Ambrose’s “atheism” with the same cool but neutral silence of a Medici cardinal hearing of the indictment of a Galileo. He would only interfere when it paid him to interfere, and this happened when he hired Ambrose on his own account, the other available openings in his firm having been filled by g
raduates of Harvard Law School, the institution then almost exclusively favored by his partners. Years later this decision, like most that Charles de Peyster made, redounded to his own benefit, for when he aged and began to fail, it was his rising relative who went to bat for him and saved his unduly swollen percentage of profits earned by younger men from being reduced by a hungry partnership.

  At first under his uncle’s guidance but rapidly on his own merits Ambrose’s rise in the firm was steady and seemingly ineluctable. He not only loved his work, he devoured it, putting in hours that surprised even the most industrious of an already industrious organization. He attacked the thorniest of great corporation problems with a kind of fierce delight, and in his admiration of power and his excitement at implementing it he lost almost every tinge of his youthful economic liberalism. He turned his reforming energy instead to studying the composition and administration of the firm that was to be the tool of his creative thinking and made plans in his head for its better development if he should ever find himself in charge. He would concentrate, for example, on improving its esprit de corps. No lawyer would ever be hired either as a partner or clerk collaterally: every ultimate member of the firm would start as an associate right out of law school, secure in the knowledge that his only rivals for partnership would be the men starting with him. Any associate passed over for partnership, a majority of which if the firm was to be kept a manageable size, would be assured of an equally well or even better paid job in a client or sister firm. Profits would be divided evenly among the partners, with certain gradations upwards with age and downwards with old age. The energy and unity of the firm as a team would not be dissipated by foreign branches; there would be one office and one alone. Oh, he had it all worked out!