The House of the Prophet Page 3

  I also had one other document, a very curious one, which I had unearthed, unknown to Felix, several years before in the files of Dinwiddie Stowe & Whelan, the Wall Street law firm in which he had been briefly a partner. It was the transcript of a tape made by the late Grant Stowe in connection with a history of the firm that he had written in his retirement. Only a small part of it had appeared in the final volume. This document had been supplied by a younger partner who was an old school friend of mine. His authority to do so was questionable, but what was that to a biographer?

  And that was all. The rest I had to glean from my own recollection. What I had to do was to put my accounts together and bind them with my own narrative of what they were and how I got them. These would then supply the source material for my book on Felix’s character and personality, or if for any reason I should fail or be unable to write such a book, they might constitute a kind of book in themselves.

  I was not young—fifty-eight—and I had never been strong. I owed it to history, and I owed it to Felix, to assemble my material in a coherent form and see that one copy at least was safely deposited in the Felix Leitner Papers at Harvard Law School.

  Manuscript of Felix Leitner’s “My Youth and Parents,” Written in 1965 for Roger Cutter

  ROGER has been after me for months now to write some account of my life or at least of the events and emotional experiences that most affected me. I have been rather grumpily averse to the idea, and he has finally been reduced to silence, but Roger’s silences can be eloquent. The way he drops a letter on my desk, the way he shrugs his shoulders when I put a question that he chooses to regard as rhetorical, even the way he answers the telephone, can serve to remind me of what he has asked for and has not received.

  “You have written about everything and everybody under the sun,” he told me. “Why is it so difficult to write about yourself?” And then, of course, he underlines it all with a flattering assurance, all the more dangerous for being sincere, that he, Roger, would find me more fascinating than any other subject.

  My trouble is not that I do not find myself interesting. I have, God knows, enough ego for that. No, my real trouble is that I hate the idea that I might seem to be writing one of those determinist novels—like Zola’s—where it is assumed that if the author correctly sets forth all the determining factors in his hero’s childhood and background—domestic, societal, genetic—it must follow logically that the hero will grow up to become a president, or to commit a murder, as the author will have predicted. I reject and abhor the doctrine that removes, or even denigrates, the free will of man—particularly my own!

  But what has at last “determined” me to pick up my pen and prepare to compose something about the elements in my life that a modern Zola would select as making me “tick”—that is, my parents, my disillusionment at Versailles, and then my divorce—is the realization, tardy but not perhaps too late, that if I do not do it, some Zola may. And then think of all the tommyrot that will be written about my being ashamed of my Jewish heritage, my denial of my past, my cultivation of Wasp society! Oh, it’s too nauseating to think of! Why, in an America that is rapidly approaching classlessness, are our historians and sociologists so obsessed with class distinctions?

  But they are. I must accept it. And now let me get on with the job of describing mother and father. Parents. What are they?

  James Bryce in his Holy Roman Empire described the division of world rule in the medieval mind between a spiritual vicar and a temporal chief, Man’s soul on earth was under the aegis of the Pope; his body under that of the Holy Roman Emperor. All creation bowed to the sway of these two forces of church and state. The fact that the Mediterranean swarmed with Moslem fleets, that in Constantinople the claims of Rome were scoffed at, and that half of Europe considered the emperor as nothing but a German king did not in the least affect the theory. The medieval people loved ideals. It pleased them to think of civilization as a unit under the cross and the scepter.

  But these opposite yet complementary concepts, this yin and yang, had a way of coming together, of merging, and then of flying apart again, each having borrowed some of the characteristics of the other. Sometimes the emperor seemed the holier, the more spiritual of the two; sometimes the wearer of the triple crown showed himself in armor on the field of battle. To obey one was by no means to win the approval of the other; indeed, it was usually the opposite.

  In some such way did I, an only child, view my father and mother. They represented the opposite poles of power to my infant eyes, and they had the same confusing way of combining and exchanging characteristics. Each had different needs and different expectations, and as soon as I thought I had learned what these were, my parents promptly changed them. What they always had in common, however, at least for me, was the quality of seeming to expect more of me than I could ever reasonably hope to expect of them.

  We lived on Riverside Drive in a stone house with a pompous beaux-arts facade much too grand for the meager, three-window frontage that it presented to the water. In winter the winds howled down the west side of Manhattan over the gray, ice-chunked river, but inside, behind closed French windows and heavy, drawn curtains, amid the odor of incense and of hothouse flowers, in chambers cluttered and gleaming with jade and teakwood and bamboo accessories, my mother lived like an odalisque—if that word can be imagined for a woman so strongly built and virtuous. Mother’s craving for the exotic, for a dimly lit interior, her satisfaction at staying always home amid the profusion of her camellias, her roses, her lilies, dressed in trailing silks and satins, her red hair piled up and elaborately curled, was perfectly consistent, at least in her own eyes, with an image of herself as zesty, full of plain common sense and downright thinking. So she balanced my father—always in black or sober brown, portly, bald, rather fierce-looking, with the big watch that he was so constantly consulting and his loud chugarum of a cough—who seemed, in a house dedicated to epicurean luxury and idleness, a stranger from the world of men’s business affairs, yet who nonetheless had mysteries and melancholies that seemed to look askance at truths too easily accepted by his spouse.

  Viewed from one point, Mother was thus the symbol of the passive life, the indoors existence, with its emphasis on the sensual, the beautiful, the artistic, while Father was more properly the sign of a male world, all bluster and action, like the sound of his stamping feet in the front hall when he came in out of the snow. But it was not always so simple, for I can remember Mother, though I was only eight at the time, declaiming like a maenad over the sinking of the Maine and calling, over the Meissen tea cups, for a crusade against the Spanish despots, while Father, oddly subdued, actually headshaking, muttered insinuations about the imperialist demon disguised as the angel of rescue. Both sexes were contained in each. Violence lurked in the potted palms, and peace in the eye of the winter storm outside.

  My father, Morris Leitner, was the son of a German Jew who had in the 1840s emigrated to escape racial injustice. Grandfather Leitner had made a small fortune in a textile business that had been carried on by his two oldest sons. Uncle Jacob, the third son, became a lawyer. He represented the family firm and also represented my father, the youngest, who had sold his share to the older brothers and invested the proceeds in tenements] Aunt Renata, their only sister, had made what the family considered a brilliant match, to the banker Isidore Adelheimer. Childless, she devoted her life to the embellishment of the Adelheimer collection of European paintings and objects of art now at the Metropolitan Museum. She was my favorite of all the family.

  Mother was not Jewish, at least so far as anyone knew. Her mother had been an English actress, married, or so she always maintained, to a Scotsman called Knox. Nobody has ever been able to discover anything about my grandfather Knox or any evidence that my grandmother had married such an individual, and I myself caught her, in her old age, in several inconsistent stories. But whatever the truth, we know that “Mrs. Knox” came to New York in 1888, and, abandoning her own unpromisin
g stage career, had devoted all her considerable energies to pushing that of her only child. Mother had the handsome, stately looks required for heroines of the period and a fine enunciation, but by all accounts she was too wooden in her movements and too mechanical in her interpretations to go very much beyond the very mild success she had enjoyed in two or three parlor comedies. She and my grandmother existed in boarding houses, hoarded newspaper notices, and besieged managers. Without her Cerberus of a mother, the lovely but naive Florine Knox, placid and luxury loving, might well have ended as a stockbroker’s mistress.

  But Grandma was there, always there. That was the point. When Father, an open-handed, well-to-do bachelor of forty, who had been accustomed to many cash conquests on Broadway, decided to add Mother to his list, he discovered that he could not even take her out to dinner without the chaperoning presence of Mrs. Knox. The only way that he could address a word to her out of earshot of this dragon was by sitting with her at one end of the boarding-house parlor while Mrs. Knox pretended to glance through the newspaper at the other. I do not know if my grandmother consciously intended to inflame the desire of this middle-aged coureur by such treatment, but she certainly succeeded, and when Father, after six months of it, actually submitted a written proposal of marriage to the mother of his beloved, he told Uncle Jacob that it had been elicited half by passion and half by a reluctant admiration of the old girl’s tenacity. I suppose he had decided that the time had come to marry, if he were ever going to, and that no bridegroom in the city could have had greater assurance of the purity of his future spouse! Florine would be a healthy and virtuous mother for the son and heir he wanted.

  I hope there was sufficient sport in my making to compensate poor Father for all he had to pay, but it scarcely seems likely. He had to expand his style of living to include these two women, and his passion could not have survived my birth, for there were no other children, and Uncle Jacob once told me that Father had returned to his “bachelor habits” as soon as my presence had begun to make itself unattractively present in mother’s figure. But the extraordinary thing about Morris and Florine Leitner is that they lived together in total amity, without even a quarrel that I could remember, until his death when I was twenty-one.

  How did they do it? By leading separate lives, I suppose, and by asking good manners of each other. This may be what is called in fashionable circles a “civilized” marriage, but it is rare, because it is rare that desire and resentment cease simultaneously on both sides. But so it must have been with my parents. Mother, who was probably what is now called frigid, was perfectly happy with her house, her flowers, her interiors, her afternoon drive in a closed car, her few faithful, empty-headed friends. She enjoyed being the star of a tiny but exclaiming world. Even her mother was eclipsed and sank into subservience once her job was done, and she now lived in silent content on an upper story. And Father had his business and his girls, his cards and his horse racing. He had depressions, I now know, but he did not show them in the parlor or dining room.

  I was never really close to either of my parents, but I saw much more of Mother than of Father. I am sure she thought she was as loving a parent as any boy could have found. She was totally complacent about herself, her life and her future, and fate justified her, for she died in her sleep at eighty, still not bored and with all her faculties intact. As a parent, she was kind and mildly interested, but detached. She always treated me as an equal. One of the few serious issues between us was clothes. Of course, at fourteen, I wanted to dress as the other boys at Mr. Driscoll’s day school on Central Park West did, and Mother wanted me in a velvet suit like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  “I don’t see why boys shouldn’t appreciate beautiful things like other people,” she said, fixing on me that placid stare that might have expressed all of her interest in the subject or might have been the veil of other preoccupations. “You may find that your suit is actually envied.”

  “Never!”

  “You mustn’t be so sure of things, Felix.”

  “I can be sure of that.”

  “Very well, then, let us assume that the suit will not be popular. Is popularity everything? Can’t you stand on your own two feet?”

  “Yes, but in shoes, not dancing pumps!”

  “I have learned not to consider the opinions of others, unless I believe they know what they’re talking about. Your father’s family have always disapproved of my clothes. They think I’m dressy. They do! They think this house is dressy. Just because I don’t choose to live in rooms shrouded with brown cloth wall coverings and filled with black mahogany!”

  This was rather beyond me. I was vaguely aware that the Leitners found Mother, to say the least, unaccountable, but I knew there was no real hostility. It was Father of whom they disapproved, because he had abandoned the faith.

  “Perhaps you can wear the suit to school one day, darling,” Mother continued in her tone of sublime expectation. “Then we can see how the boys react. Don’t worry. I shan’t be unreasonable. If they give you a hard time, I won’t ask you to wear it again. Surely that’s fair? You and I are both basically reasonable people. There’s more Knox in you than Leitner. We don’t go batting our heads against stone walls, but then, on the other hand, we’ll try anything once. Isn’t that so, my darling? Come now. Say it is!”

  There was something about Mother that could not be resisted when she appealed to me in this way. What was it? A son’s natural gallantry? A son’s natural love? Perhaps. But as I look back, it seems to me that I make out a faint quiver of apprehension, of something like alarm, in those wide gray-blue eyes fixed on me over that strained, small smile and those powdered cheeks. Was she appealing to me? Was she, a child at heart, asking me, another child, to confirm her belief that it was, after all, a child’s world? Did she suspect that there might be terror and loud, rumbling noises in the world that adults made up? And that, if I let her down, she might find out that it was not made up?

  “I remember when I was afraid to play Juliet on the road because somebody had said that Juliet was only twelve and I was already twenty-one, and Mama said to me that if I tried it once, just once, and it didn’t work out, she would never ask me to play it again. And then I remembered how Mama had worked for me and pinched and scraped for me, and of course I could not let her down. It’s not, darling, that I have had to pinch or scrape for you, for your father pays all the bills very generously and never complains—not, I suppose, that he really should—but you must know that I would have pinched and scraped for you had it been necessary. I really would!” Mother was now looking straight ahead, as if she were reciting something to herself, a creed, perhaps, that had to be true. “And so, I think if I ask you to do me a little favor, like wearing that pretty suit to school once, just once, it’s not unreasonable.”

  “But, Mummie, why? How can it matter to you?”

  “I’ll tell you why, dear. Because I want Mr. Boldini to paint you and me together, and I want you to be wearing that suit. But Mr. Boldini said that was wrong, because boys don’t dress that way any more. So I told him that suit had been worn at the Driscoll School. Now do you see? It has to be worn there. Once, anyway!”

  What could I do with an argument like that? Of course, I wore the silly suit, and of course I was made cruel fun of and got in a nasty fistfight with Sam Rosen, the class bully. But I was careful to remove the precious jacket before I engaged in strife. And when I went home I told Mother there had been no trouble at all. It was lucky that Rosen had not blacked my eye.

  “Well, you see, darling, Mummie is sometimes right. Oh, I know your father has been telling you that I’m hopelessly impractical and otherworldly. He thinks all women are. But I was earning my own living before he even met me. I know something of this great, hard world. And I know that it’s not always as great or as hard as it’s cracked up to be.”

  The next day I wore the suit again. Rosen and his little group at once accosted me.

  “Is your memory defective?” he asked
sneeringly. “Wasn’t yesterday enough?”

  I removed the jacket, slowly and deliberately, and then struck him in the chin. He jumped on me and might have killed me had not a master intervened.

  But the third day when I appeared in the suit, Rosen exchanged a look of confusion with his cohorts. Was I a lunatic? So a Roman procurator in Judea might have felt when the survivors of a persecuted sect turned up at his gate with the same shrill cries, day after day, though he felled whole forests to make crosses for their crucifixion.

  He looked away when I went straight up to him and asked him if he liked my suit. He snarled to his friends that I was “nuts.” On the fourth day he knocked me down again. On the fifth he admitted, with a half-angry, half-sheepish laugh, that he guessed the suit was all right and walked away from me.

  The class was divided. Some thought me a masochist, a term just then coming into vogue. Others thought me a fool. A few admired me. But nobody commented on my suit again. I had converted the privilege of chastisement into an embarrassment and a bore.

  Now what was the significance of my bizarre conduct? What was really at stake that I should expose myself to such ridicule and battery? After all, Mother had stipulated only that I should wear the silly suit for a day. I suppose that what I must have seen in it was Mother herself: it was pretty, very expensive, highly individual and totally inappropriate. It had nothing on earth to do with boys or with school or even with Riverside Drive. But the moment I put it on I became a part of Mother, and then there was no further denying it. But why should I have felt this maternal identification so strongly, when I associated myself so little with Father and his family? Perhaps it was because Mother was alone and therefore presumably vulnerable. If I did not protect her, nobody would, and then she might be put down, annihilated, and after that they—whoever “they” might be—would come after me. Oh, Mother, I see you to this day, naive, smiling, unaware, never asking for help!