False Gods Read online

  I saw, of course, that Gurdon, in Mr. Stonor’s place, would have behaved in just the same way. I understood perfectly that Gurdon was the prototype of the grinning imp who would always be poor Horace’s worst enemy.

  “Let us suppose, Gurdon, that everything you say is true. What does Horace have to lose by fighting for something he so desperately wants?”

  “His self-respect. Horace is a very delicate instrument, more so than you can probably imagine. He is very good at concealing his vulnerability. But in the family, we know. He is subject to dangerous spells of depression. In our sixth-form year at Groton, for example, when he failed to make the varsity football team his spirits were so low that I had to write Aunt Lydia and Uncle John to take him out of school. He was gone for two whole months.”

  “I see.” Horace had told me something about this, but not of the length of the absence. “But if Horace is going to duck every challenge in life because it may bring on a depression, where is he going to get?”

  “I never said he should duck every challenge. You may not trust me, Maurice, but even you will have to ask, where Horace is concerned, what motive could possibly guide me but his welfare.”

  I knew well enough how I could have answered his question: “The desire to keep someone whom you have always sought to dominate from becoming a bigger and richer man than yourself!”

  But of course I said no such thing. How would that have helped Horace? I simply suggested that we should have to agree to disagree and regretted that I had to leave him to finish my term paper in the library.

  Horace’s resolution not to relinquish his pursuit of Dorothy could be implemented only by correspondence in the next three months. His particular concern was with Thorp.

  “What chance do I have against a guy who’s already on the spot?” he asked me gloomily.

  “The chance of being able to show only your best side in your letters. Thorp may make an ass of himself, who knows? Anything can happen on that boat. And if she chances to feel a bit pushed around by Daddy and a bit taken for granted by his too-obvious candidate, a breezy cheerful letter from you may hit just the right note. The great thing is not to be mawkish. Make her wonder whether you may not be turning into a bigger person without her. “

  What is rarer than a friend who takes one’s advice? Horace went back to his room and wrote out a long letter, which he then asked me to read. But I declined.

  “You must get out of the habit of seeking people’s approval.” I was thinking of Gurdon. “You don’t need it.”

  He became thoughtful at this, and after a minute he asked, “If I should propose to do something nice for you, Maury, would you put it down to my seeking your approval?”

  “Not if it was nice enough. What are you proposing? I warn you in advance that I’ll accept it.”

  “Don’t be too hasty. I want you to think it over first. I’d like to put you up for Psi U.”

  I whistled. Then I tried to pass it off with a pun. “The first Jew in Psi U? It even rhymes.”

  “There’s got to be a first time for everything.”

  “Horry, whom are you trying to kid? You know you’d never get me in.”

  “Don’t be too sure. You’re giving me a new confidence in myself. Well, let’s see how it goes.”

  As I studied his countenance I thought I could indeed make out a new confidence. At the same time it occurred to me that perhaps I should let him do what he proposed, as much for his sake as for my own. More, really, for a fraternity as “chic” as his would be socially a seven-league-boot stride that could hurt me as much as it helped in the antagonisms it might create.

  At any rate, after some days’ rumination, I agreed to be put up, and Horace at once went to work. He arranged to have me seconded by the member of his Groton group whom I most liked, Ethan Barlow, and this did much to reconcile me to the tussle that was bound to follow. Barlow was, like me, a robust fellow with thick curly black hair, but unlike me he had a distinctly patrician air. He was a first-class athlete with a first-class (though not original) mind, and a natural leader in our Yale class, softening the impression of his sometimes exhausting energy with the warmth of his natural charm. When he grabbed you by the elbow and suggested a Saturday excursion to New York following a six-mile morning run to take in a matinée of Nazimova in Ibsen and an evening on the town, you threw down your books and went along. It might go without saying that he worshipped Theodore Roosevelt and lamented that he had been born too late to have been a Rough Rider.

  I knew that my father would disapprove of the fraternity business, as indeed he did, answering my letter with three sentences: “I should never have abandoned one chaining tradition to be shackled to another. But who knows? You may find it at least amusing.” What I did find amusing, or at least interesting, was that Horace, in promoting me, showed a good deal more political shrewdness than I had imagined him to possess. He played skillfully on his friends’ desire not to appear stuffy and went so far as to suggest that the fraternity would get the credit for admitting a Jew who wasn’t really a Jew at all, thus having and eating its cake of broad-mindedness. When I learned of this from the candid Ethan Barlow, I put it to him that my honor might require me to withdraw my name.

  “But you can’t do that to Horry after all his work! It wouldn’t be like you, Maury. I thought you were out to conquer the world.”

  “Only if it’s worth conquering.”

  “And I’ve been thinking of you as a kind of Genghis Khan!”

  “Would he have joined Psi U?”

  “If only to turn it into a pile of skulls.”

  Well, of course, he was right: I couldn’t do that to Horace, and I accepted my hard-earned election. Looking back, I must admit that the fraternity afforded me much pleasure. My memory of the old campus with its frame of dark, homely buildings is permeated with an atmosphere of noisy enthusiasm, of amiable brainlessness, of ingenuous idealism. There were members of Psi U it was impossible not to like, and I thought I preferred one Eli to a dozen Harvard “gentlemen.” But at the time I had another reservation, which I also put to Ethan.

  “I don’t mind owing an election to you and Horace. But I must admit I’d hate to owe it to Gurdon.”

  Ethan looked at me sharply. “Why so?”

  “Because he doesn’t like me. Oh, it’s not that he’s not pleasant enough. But I get the distinct feeling that he thinks his cousin stepped rather far off the reservation in making such a pal of me.”

  Ethan considered his answer to this for a few moments. “I may be out of order, but if thinking you owe Gurdon anything is going to spoil the idea of Psi U for you, I’d better speak out. Gurdon hasn’t helped your candidacy a bit. In fact, he opposed it. When Horry wasn’t around to hear him, he actually talked you down.”

  I think this information did more than anything else to make me appreciate my election. If the issue was important enough to make Gurdon disloyal to his cousin and roommate, the fraternity might have more than a mere undergraduate importance in life.

  “Do me a favor, Ethan. Promise me you’ll never tell Gurdon that you’ve told me.”

  “But I had every intention of doing so! I’d feel like a sneak otherwise.”

  “Feel like a sneak then. Please. How could I ever feel easy in his and Horace’s rooms if he knew that I knew?”

  Ethan agreed to be silent, though he may have suspected that I had not given him my real reason. I suspected even then that Gurdon was destined to cut a bigger figure in the world than his cousin, and I had no wish to throw away any potential asset, certainly not for the petty satisfaction of showing a mean man that I knew of his meanness.

  My election to Psi U, however, resulted also in a pleasanter discovery: the charmingly tactful side of Horace’s nature. I wanted to acknowledge his sponsorship with an appropriate gesture, and I ordered from Tiffany’s a gold tie pin with a sapphire over our intertwined initials. He showed an enthusiastic gratitude, wore it once on a New York weekend and then put it away, s
aying it was too fine for any but the grandest occasions. Of course I never saw it again, and it did not take me long to realize that this florid piece with its sentimental expression of friendship had been in the worst possible taste. I winced as I imagined Gurdon drawling, “They just never learn, do they?” But then I recognized that Horace would never have shown it to Gurdon. He would have understood how quickly one as observant as I would learn, and he was much too considerate to assail me with a lecture on breeding that could not have seemed anything but condescending. Which is one reason that Horace has been one of the few people in my life I have loved.

  The elation that Horace felt with Dorothy’s warmer answers to his letters was, in my opinion, an exaggerated reaction even to the affection that he read into them. But it showed how repressed he had been. He put me in mind of a handsome painted puppet released from his strings and cavorting about the stage on his own. It may have seemed to him that he had spent his life adjusting himself to the role in which he deemed his family to have cast him: the freckled kid in knickers, with hair either too slickly brushed or hopelessly messy, whom his elders liked smilingly to call “incorrigible,” but whose harmless mischievousness and sound healthy appetites could be counted on to guard him from the vices that peculiarly infected an American Eden.

  He may even have apprehended that only by preserving such an image could he be forgiven the good looks and boyish charm that his mother seemed almost to deprecate, as if he had manifested a kind of hubris in offering so unflattering a contrast to his fatuous older brother and his squealing sisters. For if his family depended on him, so to speak, to reconcile them with the brownstone community of Manhattan, if without him to dress up the background his father might have seemed a pompous nincompoop and his mother a complaining valetudinarian, it was in no way to Horace’s credit, but simply the evidence of a duty imposed on him by an arcane power which would promptly expose him as the lowest of frauds should he forget for a minute the lines of his given part.

  I can go even further, now that I am launched in Freudian reminiscence. I venture to perceive in the very arrangement of the floors of the Aspinwalls’ brownstone the scaffold that upheld and supported Horace’s neurosis. Such small distinction as this edifice could boast diminished as you rose on the high straight stairs, and when you reached the fourth floor with Horace’s and his sisters’ rooms (the five maids huddled in cubicles above), you were faced with the plainest of brown wood factory-made furniture and walls adorned with cheap prints of academic paintings. What, however, particularly marked the junior status of this level was that whereas on the floor below each of Horace’s parents and their older son enjoyed a separate bathroom, the fourth story was equipped with but a single water closet, though its availability for all of the younger Aspinwalls seemed curiously indicated by its possession of three doors. It was the modest, even the prudish habit of Horace’s sisters to lock all three portals when they were using the plumbing, but when they exited they would invariably unlatch only one. Horace therefore might have to try two doors unsuccessfully before gaining access, and when either Chattie or Lizzie was actually within she would never give him warning by singing out “Someone’s in here!” but wait until he had assailed the locked third and then shout a triumphant, “Yenh, yenh!”

  It may sound fanciful, but I suggest that Horace’s association of himself with the two female co-tenants of the water closet had some relation to his earlier sense of unworthiness in respect to Dorothy. He may have come to regard that mocking cry from behind the trio of locked doors, followed soon by a vulgar cascade, as a brutal association of sex with excretion in which he and his silly sisters were irretrievably caught, whereas his father and brother below, real men, performing their natural functions in dignified and unintruded-upon silence, reserved their genital energy for females whom it could only awe.

  Anyway, that family must have done something to him!

  ***

  I speak with some inevitable hindsight when I describe the dramatis personae of my life, but I think it is true to say that from my first serious conversation with Frank Stonor I had spotted him as a man dominated by a single passion: the need to impress a world that he despised. Seated in a black carved Elizabethan armchair before a blazing fire in the immense log-walled hall of his Adirondacks “cabin,” under the severed heads of bear, moose, and elk, the highest hanging thirty feet above him, his affectation of formal attire in the wilderness, even to a high collar and scarlet tie (though there might have been a small concession in the dark tweeds), seemed to proclaim that a white-haired gentleman of such opaquely gazing eyes, of so high and brown a brow, with a gnarled hand so firmly grasping the gold head of a rarely relinquished cane, had needed nothing but his presence to smite fatally the beasts whose horns and tusks now harmlessly threatened him.

  That he should spend his money in a forest where none but carefully selected guests, conveyed thither by a private railway, could see the results, rather than on a villa in Newport visible to other villas, was typical of his inverted snobbishness. I doubt that he feared anything on earth except that he might be taken as a fair representative of any group or class. In a Republican society, he was a politically active Democrat who delighted in alienating fellow tycoons by supporting (at least at the dinner table) government regulation of business. In a new plutocracy concerned with draping its genealogical nudity in purchased pedigrees, he liked to boast that the Stonors descended from sheep stealers in Norfolk and had bought their crest at Tiffany’s. And confronted with the showy collections of old masters by means of which the financial leaders of the day hoped to hitch a ride to immortality, he would shrug and say that the souls of ancient commercial societies were best expressed in the beautiful gold coins that he displayed in glass cases in his office.

  There was to be a house party of young people at his camp a couple of weeks after he and his daughter returned from Europe, and it was even rumored that it might be the occasion of the announcement of Dorothy’s engagement to Guy Thorp. Horace was invited, and so, surprisingly, was I.

  “I told you she liked you,” Horace explained.

  “Maybe she wants someone to catch you if you faint dead away at the news.”

  “Oh, Maury, is it possible? Can she really be going to marry that man? Why have you been urging me on so?”

  But I was more irritated than touched by his woebegone look. How could a man care so much and have so little fight in him? I took from his hand the letter in which my invitation was included and read it.

  “Well, at least she tells you just who’s coming and when. Thorp isn’t getting there until Monday, and we’re asked for the preceding Friday. That gives you the whole weekend to make your play.”

  “Oh, she’s just giving herself time to reconcile me to the news before the hero arrives.”

  “Fight, man, will you! Fight!”

  And fight he actually did. For one whole day. When we arrived in the Adirondacks we were greeted by a Dorothy who was friendly but reserved. On Saturday morning she took Horace off on an all-day ride in the woods, leaving me behind with the other guests, none of whom I knew and none of whom showed the least interest in getting to know me. Mr. Stonor, however, proved unexpectedly cordial. It appeared that he had read and enjoyed my father’s books, and he invited me to go fishing with him on the lake that afternoon in a large rowboat oared by a guide who sat near the bow. Mr. Stonor paid scant attention to the sport, letting the guide, as we drifted, do the casting for him and hand him the rod only on the rare occasions when a fish was hooked. I did my own casting, of course, but I paused whenever it looked as if Mr. Stonor wanted to talk. After all, I was there to be of assistance to Horace. When he embarked at last on a topic that seemed to interest him, I dropped my rod, lit a pipe and listened.

  “You may have made the right decision to go into law, young man. Dorothy has described you as ambitious. When I was your age the future was all in business and banking. But now the railways are laid down, the frontier’s gon
e and the oil wells are pumping. The captains and the kings have departed, and it’s time for the little men to litigate over the spoils.”

  “I gather you don’t think much of lawyers. Dorothy hinted as much.”

  “I don’t think much of anybody, Leonard. I take the world as it comes. I was watching you at lunch, because of what Dorothy told me about you. You obviously didn’t know any of her silly friends, but you held your own well enough. You strike me as a man who wants to run things rather than be run. In my day we old capitalists pretty much took the law into our own hands. But that day is over. In the future it’s the lawyer who will tell us how to do what we want to do.”

  “How to get around the law, you mean, sir?”

  Mr. Stonor shrugged. “If you want to put it that way. I look to acts, not definitions. Anyway, it’s going to be a world that a clever lawyer should be able to dominate. Tell me, young man: Who in your opinion has been the most powerful American of the past decade?”

  “Wouldn’t that be President Roosevelt?”

  “Well, he’d certainly like to think so. He told me once, as if it were something to the last degree presumptuous, that Pierpont Morgan, conferring with him in the White House, appeared to treat him as an equal. But I have no doubt that Morgan considered him an inferior. If you had seen as I did, last year in the panic, our financial leaders waiting respectfully outside the door of Morgan’s great art-studded library to be admitted, one by one, each to submit his plan of how to save the nation to the silent figure bent over his game of solitaire, you would have witnessed a demonstration of real power. The great Theodore, for all his trumpeting, couldn’t have done it. But it was nonetheless the end of an era.”

  “Horace’s mother told me that her father had spotted you as a man who would make his mark in life when you were only my age. Is that what you are doing to me, sir? If so, I certainly appreciate it.”