The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss Read online

  “It isn’t as if the child didn’t have everything she wanted,” Mrs. Spreddon pointed out. “All she has to do is ask, and she gets it. Within limits, of course. I’m not one to spoil a child. What could it be that she’s dissatisfied with?”

  Mrs. Lane, taking in the detail of her sister-in-law’s redecorated parlor, heavily Georgian, all gleaming mahogany and bright new needlework, reflected that Maud might, after all, have something to be dissatisfied with.

  “Is she ever alone?” she asked.

  “Why should she be alone?” Mrs. Spreddon demanded. “She’s far too shy as it is. She hates playing with other children. She hasn’t a single friend at school that I know of.”

  “Neither did I. At that age.”

  Mrs. Spreddon was not surprised to hear this, but then she had no intention of having her Maud grow up like Lila and perhaps live in Paris and buy a Monet every fifth year with the money that she saved by not having children.

  “But Maud doesn’t like anybody,” she protested. “Not even me.”

  “Why should she?”

  “Oh, Lila. You’ve been abroad too long. Whoever heard of a child not liking her own family when they’ve been good to her?”

  “I have. Just now.”

  Mrs. Spreddon frowned at her. “You seem to think it’s my fault,” she said.

  “It isn’t anyone’s fault, Mary,” Mrs. Lane assured her. “Maud didn’t choose you for a mother. There’s no reason she should like you.”

  “And what should I do about it?”

  Mrs. Lane shrugged her shoulders. “Is there anything to be done?” she asked. “Isn’t the milk pretty well spilled by now?”

  “That’s all very well for you to say,” Mrs. Spreddon retorted. “But a parent can’t take that point of view. A parent has to believe.”

  “I don’t mean that she’s hopeless,” Mrs. Lane said quickly. “I just mean that she’s different. There’s nothing so terrible about that, Mary. Maud’s more like her grandfather.”

  “The Judge? But he was such an old dear, Lila!”

  Mrs. Lane placed a cigarette carefully in her ivory holder and held it for several seconds before lighting it. She hated disputes, but the refusal of her sister-in-law to face any facts at all in the personalities around her other than the cheerful ones that she attributed to them, a refusal that Mrs. Lane felt to be indigenous to the stratum of American life that she had abandoned for Paris, irritated her almost beyond endurance.

  “My father was not an ‘old dear,’ Mary,” she said in a rather metallic tone. “He was a very intellectual and a very strange man. He was never really happy until they made him a judge, and he could sit on a bench, huddled in his black robes, and look out at the world.”

  “You have such a peculiar way of looking at things, Lila,” Mrs. Spreddon retorted. “Judge Spreddon was a great man. Certainly, I never knew a man who was more loved.”

  Mrs. Lane inhaled deeply. “Maybe Maud’s daughters-in-law will say the same about her.”

  “Maybe they will,” Mrs. Spreddon agreed. “If she ever has any.”

  Mr. Spreddon worried even more than his wife, but he knew better than to expose himself to the chilly wind of his sister’s skepticism. When he sought consolation it was in the sympathetic male atmosphere of his downtown world where he could always be sure of a friendly indifference and an easy optimism to reassure his troubled mind. Mr. Spreddon at fifty-five showed no outward symptoms of any inner insecurity. He was a big man of magnificent health, with gray hair and red cheeks, who had succeeded to his father’s position in the great law firm that bore his name. Not that this had been an easy or automatic step, or that it could have been accomplished without the distinct ability that Mr. Spreddon possessed. He was an affable and practical-minded man whose advice was listened to with respect at directors’ meetings and by the widows and daughters of the rich. But it was true, nevertheless, that beneath the joviality of his exterior he carried a variegated sense of guilt: guilt at having succeeded a father whose name was so famous in the annals of law, guilt at having leisure in an office where people worked so hard, guilt at being a successful lawyer without having ever argued a case, guilt at suspecting that the sound practical judgment for which he was reputed was, in the last analysis, nothing but a miscellany of easy generalities. It may have been for this reason that he took so paternal an interest in the younger lawyers in his office, particularly in Halsted Nicholas, the prodigy from Yonkers who had started as an office boy and had been Judge Spreddon’s law clerk when the old man died.

  “I tell you she’s all right, Bill,” Halsted said with his usual familiarity when Mr. Spreddon came into the little office where he was working surrounded by piles of photostatic exhibits, both feet on is desk. “You ought to be proud of her. She’s got spunk, that girl.”

  “You’ll admit it’s an unusual way to show it.”

  “All the better. Originality should be watered.” Halsted swung around in his chair to face the large ascetic features of the late Judge Spreddon in the photograph over his bookcase. “The old boy would have approved,” he added irreverently. “He always said it was hate that made the world go round.”

  Mr. Spreddon never quite knew what to make of Halsted’s remarks. “But I don’t want her to be abnormal,” he said. “If she goes on hating everybody, how is she ever going to grow up and get married?”

  “Oh, she’ll get married,” Halsted said.

  “Well, sure. If she changes.”

  “Even if she doesn’t.”

  Mr. Spreddon stared. “Now, what makes you say that?” he demanded.

  “Take me. I’ll marry her.”

  Mr. Spreddon laughed. “You’ll have to wait quite a bit, my boy,” he said. “She’s only thirteen.”

  3

  Mr. and Mrs. Spreddon were not content with the passive view recommended by Mrs. Lane and Halsted Nicholas. Conscientious and loving parents as they were, they recognized that what ailed Maud was certainly something beyond their own limited control, and they turned, accordingly, in full humility and with open purses, to the psychiatrist, the special school, the tutor, the traveling companion. In fact, the whole paraphernalia of our modern effort to adjust the unadjusted was brought to bear on their sulking daughter. Nobody ever spoke to Maud now except with predetermined cheerfulness. She was taken out of the home that she had so disliked and sent to different schools in different climates, always in the smiling company of a competent woman beneath whose comfortable old-maid exterior was hidden a wealth of expensive psychological experience, and whose well-paid task it was to see if somehow it was not possible to pry open poor tightened Maud and permit the entry of at least a trickle of spontaneity. Maud spent a year in Switzerland under the care of one of the greatest of doctors, who regularly devoted one morning a week to walking with her in a Geneva park; she spent a year in Austria under equally famous auspices, and she passed two long years in Arizona in a small private school where she rode and walked with her companion and enjoyed something like peace. During visits home she was treated with a very special consideration, and her brothers were instructed always to be nice to her.

  Maud saw through it all, however, from the very first and resented it with a continuing intensity. It was the old battle that had always raged between herself and her family; of this she never lost sight, and to give in because the struggle had changed its form would have been to lose the only fierce little logic that existed in her drab life. To this she clung with the dedication of a vestal virgin, wrapping herself each year more securely in the coating of her own isolation. Maud learned a certain adjustment to life, but she lost none of the bitterness of her conflict in the process. At nineteen she still faced the world with defiance in her eyes.

  When she returned from the last of her many schools and excursions and came home to live with her family in New York, it was just six years from the ugly Christmas Eve of her original explosion. She had grown up into a girl whose appearance might have been handsome
had one not been vaguely conscious of a presence somehow behind her holding her back—a person, so to speak, to whom one could imagine her referring questions over her shoulder and whose answer always seemed to be no. She had lovely, long, dark hair which she wore, smooth and uncurled, almost to her shoulders; she was very thin, and her skin was a clear white. Her eyes, large and brown, had a steady, uncompromising stare. She gave all the appearance of great shyness and reserve, for she hardly spoke at all, but the settled quality of her stare made it evident that any reluctance on her part to join in general conversation did not have its origin in timidity. Maud had established her individuality and her prejudices, and it was felt that this time she had come home to stay. Her parents still made spasmodic efforts to induce her to do this thing or that, but essentially her objectives had been attained. Nobody expected anything of her. Nobody was surprised when she did not kiss them.

  She adopted for herself an unvarying routine. Three days a week she worked at a hospital; she rode in Central Park; she read and played the piano and occasionally visited the Metropolitan Museum. Mrs. Spreddon continued the busy whirl of her life and reserved teatime every evening as her time for Maud. What more could she do? It was difficult to work up any sort of social life for a daughter so reluctant, but she did make occasional efforts and managed once in a while to assemble a stiff little dinner for Maud where the guests would be taken on, immediately upon rising from table, to the best musical comedy of the season, the only bait that could have lured them there. Maud endured it without comment. She was willing to pay an occasional tax for her otherwise unruffled existence.

  ***

  At one of these dinners, she found Halsted Nicholas seated on her right. She remembered him from earlier days when he had spent a summer with them as her brothers’ tutor, and her memories of that summer were pleasanter than most. He was, of course, no longer a boy, being close to thirty-five, and a junior partner now of her father’s; but his face had lost none of the sensitivity and charm, none of the uncompromising youth that she dimly remembered. He seemed an odd combination of ease and tension; one could tell that his reserve and even his air of gentle timidity were the product of manners; for when he spoke, it was with a certain roughness that indicated assurance. This was reinforced by the intent stare with which he fastened his very round and dark eyes on his plate and the manner in which his black eyebrows seemed to ripple with his thick black hair. She would have liked to talk to him, but that, of course, was not her way, and she watched him carefully as he crumbled his roll on the thick white tablecloth.

  “You’ve certainly been taking your own sweet time to grow up, Maud,” he said in a familiar tone, breaking a cracker into several pieces and dropping them into his soup as Maud had been taught never to do. “This makes it six years that I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Six years?” she repeated in surprise.

  He nodded, looking at her gravely. “Six years,” he said. “Ever since that wonderful Christmas Eve when you told the assembled Spreddon family to put on their best bib and tucker and jump in the lake.”

  Maud turned pale. Even the heavy silver service on the long table seemed to be jumping back and forth. She put down her spoon. “So you know that,” she said in a low voice. “They talk about it. They tell strangers.”

  He laughed his loud, easy laugh. “I’m hardly a stranger, Maud,” he said. “I’ve been working as a lawyer in your father’s office for twelve years and before that I was there as an office boy. And you’re wrong about their telling people, too. They didn’t have to tell me. I was there.”

  She gasped. “You couldn’t have been,” she protested. “I remember it so well.” She paused. “But why are you saying this, anyway? What’s the point?”

  Again he laughed. “You don’t believe me,” he said. “But it’s so simple. It was Christmas Eve and I was all alone in town, and your old man, who, in case you don’t know it, is one prince of a guy, took pity on me and asked me up. I told him I’d come in a Santa Claus get-up and surprise you kids. Anyway I was right in here, in this very dining room, sticking my beard on and peering through the crack in those double doors to watch for my cue from your father when—bingo!—you pulled that scene. Right there before my eyes and ears! Oh, Maud! You were terrific!”

  Even with his eyes, his sure but friendly eyes, upon her as he said all this, it was as if it were Christmas again, Christmas with every stocking crammed and to be emptied, item by item, before the shining and expectant parental faces. Maud felt her stomach muscles suddenly tighten in anguished humiliation. She put her napkin on the table and looked desperately about her.

  “Now Maud,” he said, putting his firm hand on hers. “Take it easy.”

  “Leave me alone,” she said in a rough whisper. “Leave me be.”

  “You’re not going to be angry with me?” he protested. “After all these years? All these years that I’ve been waiting for the little girl with the big temper to grow up? Maud, how unkind.”

  She gave him a swift look. “I’ve been back home and grown up for several months,” she pointed out ungraciously. “If you know Father so well, you must have known that. And this is the first time you’ve been to the house.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Lawyers are busy men, Maud,” he said. “We can’t get off every night. Besides, I’m shy.”

  She was not to be appeased so lightly. “You didn’t come to see me, anyway,” she retorted. “You came because Daddy begged you to.” She smiled sourly. “He probably went down on his knees.”

  “Nothing of the sort,” he said coolly. “If you must know, I came because I heard we were going to Roll Out the Barrel.”

  Maud stared at him for a second and then burst out laughing. “Then you’re in for a sad disappointment, Mr. Nicholas,” she said, “because Daddy couldn’t get seats. We’re going to Doubles or Quits. I do hope you haven’t seen it.”

  He covered his face with his napkin. “But I have,” he groaned. “Twice!”

  Maud, of course, did not know it, but Halsted Nicholas was the partner who, more than any other, held the clients of Spreddon & Spreddon. Mr. Spreddon increasingly accepted positions of public trust; he was now president of a museum, a hospital, and a zoo, all the biggest of their kind; he represented to his partners that this sort of thing, although unremunerative and time-consuming, “paid dividends in the long run.” If anyone grumbled, it was not Halsted, whose industry was prodigious. What drove him so hard nobody knew. He never showed ambition of the ordinary sort, as, for example, wanting his name at the top of the firm letterhead or asking for paneling in his office. He felt, it was true, the deepest gratitude to Mr. Spreddon and to his late father, the Judge, who had seen promise in him and who had sent him to college and law school, but this he had already repaid a hundredfold. He loved the law, it was true, but he was already one of the ablest trial lawyers in the city and could certainly have held his position without quite so liberal an expenditure of energy. No, if Halsted was industrious it was probably by habit. He may have lacked the courage to stop and look into himself. He was a man who had met and undertaken many responsibilities; he had supported his friends with advice and his parents with money; he was considered to be—and, indeed, he was—an admirable character, unspoiled even by a Manhattan success; but whatever part of himself he revealed, it was a public part. His private self was unshared.

  He left the theater that night after the second act to go down to his office and work on a brief, but the following Sunday he called at the Spreddons’ and took Maud for a walk around the reservoir. A week later he invited her to come to Wall Street to dine with him, on the excuse that he had to work after dinner and could not get uptown, and after she had done this, which he said no other girl would have done, even for Clark Gable, he became a steady caller at the Spreddons’. Maud found herself in the unprecedented situation of having a beau.

  He was not a very ceremonious beau; he never sent her flowers or whispered silly things in her ear, and
not infrequently, at the very last moment, when they had planned an evening at the theater or the opera, he would call up to say that he couldn’t get away from the office. Maud, however, saw nothing unusual in this. What mattered to her was that he expected so little. He never pried into her past or demanded her agreement or enthusiasm over anything; he never asked her to meet groups of his friends or to go to crowded night clubs. He never, furthermore, offered the slightest criticism of her way of living or made suggestions as to how she might enlarge its scope. He took her entirely for granted and would, without any semblance of apology, talk for an entire evening about his own life and struggles and the wonderful things that he had done in court. She was a slow talker, and he a fast one; it was easier for both if he held forth alone on the subjects closest to his heart. In short, she became accustomed to him; he fitted in with her riding and her hospital work. She had been worried at first, particularly in view of his initial revelation, never thereafter alluded to, of what he had once witnessed, but soon afterwards she had been reassured. It was all right. He would let her be.

  4

  Mr. and Mrs. Spreddon, in the meantime, were holding their breath. They had almost given up the idea that Maud would ever attract any man, much less a bachelor as eligible as Halsted. It was decided, after several conferences, that what nature had so miraculously started, nature might finish herself, and they resolved not to interfere. This, unfortunately, they were not able to do without a certain ostentation, and Maud became aware of an increasing failure on the part of her family to ask their usual questions about what she had done the night before and what meals she expected to eat at home the following day. If she referred to Halsted, her comment received the briefest of nods or answers. Nobody observing the fleeting references with which his name was dismissed at the Spreddon board would ever have guessed that the parental hearts were throbbing at the mere possibility of his assimilation into the family.