Manhattan Monologues Read online

  “But it might kill me if Harry fails! Isn’t that such an emergency as the trust might call for? Think of all that poor boy has been through, with his heart trouble and losing that darling little wife and child and not being able to finish the war in the company of his great idol, the general!”

  I couldn’t help wondering what horrors could befall me that would “kill,” or even grievously upset, my wonderful mother. The reflection would have helped to tighten, if tightening were needed, my resolution never to exercise that trust power except for the direst emergency affecting the life tenant. My reply perhaps sounded pontifical, but an undervalued son must have some compensation.

  “We must pray then that the refusal of your fiduciaries to stretch the exercise of their power beyond the limits prescribed by law will not have the dire effect on the income beneficiary that you so dismally predict.”

  “Oh, Charles, you’re impossible.”

  “It is not I who am that, Mother. It is what you ask of me.”

  “Leave me alone. Go away.”

  Which I was glad enough to do.

  I did not hear of the matter for another month, and then it was only indirectly. Indirectly but fatally. At the bank one morning when I was getting ready to depart for my lunch club, Ray Burnside, the fussy but earnest diminutive assistant trust officer in charge of Mother’s affairs, faced me across my desk with a pale countenance drawn with apprehension. It appeared that a hundred thousand dollars worth of U.S. Treasury notes were missing from her trust.

  “You mean stolen?” I asked, gaping.

  “No, no. At least I dare not think so. You will remember that we had agreed to sell them, and your brother asked me to deliver them to him so that he could use his own broker.”

  I felt at once sick. “You shouldn’t have done that. You should have come to me.”

  “But after all, he is a trustee.”

  “Even so. How long have the notes been gone?”

  “Three weeks. I’ve telephoned your brother several times to ask whether he’s sold them and, if so, where the proceeds are. He keeps putting me off and insisting on more time. Says it’s not a good market to sell in, which is ridiculous, of course, and gives me all sorts of odd excuses. If you can’t get him to give us back the notes or the money, Charles, I’ll have to go to the big boss.”

  I thought for a moment and then nodded. “Give me till tomorrow. I’ll take care of it.”

  What made me so immediately sure that Harry had embezzled the money? What right had I to accuse, even in my mind alone, my amiable brother of a crime, when he had never been known to commit one? It may have been because I had come to my limit in believing in a universe that was so consistently perverse as to favor Harry with everyone’s smiles and love and me with their sniggers and reluctant respect. There had to be somewhere a stop; Harry had to have his comeuppance. And wasn’t the horrid thrill that seemed to trickle through my being one of an odious satisfaction? Wasn’t it an essential part of the creature I had been made? And, after all, I hadn’t made myself, had I? I could be at fault only if I acted on it.

  I telephoned Harry to say that I was coming over to his museum to ask about the notes, and he replied, quite without agitation, that he would meet me in the main gallery. This long dark chamber was empty when I arrived, although the place was open to the public. It contained a dozen dioramas of city history, some moderately amusing, such as J. P. Morgan immersed in a game of solitaire as he awaits the answer to his proposition of how to bolster a crashing stock market from the grim group of bankers gathered around him, or the dapper figure of Mayor Jimmy Walker skipping down the steps of City Hall with a gorgeous flapper on his arm. I was contemplating the representation of Diana Vreeland at her desk in the office of the editor of Vogue when a voice from behind me sounded suddenly in my ear.

  “That is not a waxwork. That is Diana herself. She comes every day in her lunch hour and poses. Don’t you love it?”

  Of course, it was Harry, but for a moment I almost believed him. As a joker, he could be amazingly dead pan.

  “Can you never be serious?” I asked with a sigh. “You know why I’ve come.”

  “Aren’t trusts too serious to be taken seriously? Think of what a wonderful diorama we could make of you and Mr. Burnside when you discovered the missing notes. Or rather when you didn’t discover the missing notes.”

  I looked about in search of a more fitting place for our talk. But what could be more private than the empty gallery? There was a bench in the center, and we moved to it.

  “Burnside is behaving perfectly well,” I told him. “He hasn’t made any insinuations. He simply wants the notes or the proceeds of their sale deposited in the bank tomorrow. Or he will go to our president. It’s the only thing he can do.”

  “And the president will go to the cops?”

  “He will go, unless I can give him an acceptable explanation, to the district attorney. It’s the only thing he can do.”

  “It would be an even better diorama with which to close my illfated museum! Harry Pierce in a striped suit!”

  “Harry, for God’s sake, what have you done with those notes?”

  Harry was as calm and reflective as if I had asked him about an ordinary business transaction. “Well, I had only a limited time, three weeks as it turns out, to make the hundred gees double themselves so that I’d be able to save my museum and put the money back in the bank. There was just one way to do that, and that was by gambling. I had a glorious week in Las Vegas. At one point I was up to a hundred and eighty thousand. And then I lost it all.”

  “All of it? I thought that only happened in French nineteenth-century novels!”

  “Maybe that’s where I belong. I haven’t a friend in the world who would lend me the money now. I’d have to tell them why, and then they’d drop me like a hot potato.”

  “Why would you have to tell them?”

  “Because they’re friends, damn it all! I should have told Mother, but she said you’d never invade the trust, so there was no point.”

  “I guess that leaves me.”

  “No, Chas! Never!”

  “It won’t bust me. Don’t worry.”

  Harry was suddenly deeply earnest. He turned to face me and grasped my shoulders. “You can’t do it. Not now that you know what I’ve done. You’d be compounding a crime.”

  “Oh, bosh. No one need know.”

  “Burnside would know.”

  “I can take care of Burnside.”

  “But you’d be in his hands. If ever he needed you to back his promotion. No, Chas, I can’t accept that.”

  “Leave the details to me, Harry.”

  He jumped to his feet, more worked up than I had ever seen him. “I absolutely forbid it! All your life you’ve been the good boy and I’ve been the bad. And what have you got for it? Precious little. Even from Father and Mother. Even after you made up to them for all the losses I’d caused. Oh, I knew about all that; yes I did! And now you want to turn yourself into a crook to save a crook. Well, I won’t have it! If there’s one decent thing I can do now, I’m going to do it. Don’t stand in my way, Chas. I mean it!”

  “But, Harry,” I cried, aghast, “you’ll go to jail!”

  “And tell me, dear brother, isn’t that where I belong?”

  ***

  Harry went to the penitentiary for two years, and I eventually made up the loss to Mother’s trust out of my own pocket. But did I get any credit for that? Far from it. She and plenty of others among the family and friends excoriated me for not doing it in time to save him, and when Harry wrote to her that he had forbidden me to compound his crime, the universal attitude was that I should have saved him in spite of himself and that my reaching for the excuse of a breach of law, which would have never been discovered or, if it had, probably been condoned, was a mere blind to hide my jealousy and resentment of my popular and beloved sibling. And they may have been right, too, in the funny way that people have of being right when they attribute nas
ty motives to one. For had I not been sure that Harry would reject my offer to save him, and didn’t that give me the excuse I may have consciously or unconsciously needed to throw him to the dogs?

  When Harry’s term was over, after only sixteen months because of model prison behavior, he was greeted at his club with a huge and hearty “coming-out” party, to which I was not invited. But, as I have said, people don’t laugh at me anymore. And that’s something.

  Entre Deux Guerres

  The Marriage Broker

  THE THING THAT intrigues me most about my mother-in-law’s family—almost as much as it irritates me, but never quite, oh no!—is the way they silently, and yet so audibly, disapprove of what they reluctantly concede to be my charm, a quality notably lacking in all of them, with the exception of my husband and two children, and at the same time expect me to use this sole asset of mine (if such it be) to pull them out of the social and financial holes into which they ever more deeply sink. And there we were, in 1937, the year of which I am writing, incurably wed to our expensive tastes and just as incurably lacking what used to be a moderately comfortable little family fortune.

  Grinnell Scott, my lord but no longer my master (I have had to take up the reins of management), may still be one of the most beloved and popular sportsmen on the Northeastern Seaboard, a long-term president of the New York Golf and Tennis Club and a squash racquets champion at age fiftyfive. But with a genial smile and shrug of his shoulders he leaves all business matters to me, droning, in his pleasant whine, “But, Katie, sweet, you always got high school marks, and you know I could never add two and two.” Well, I’ve done my best, but I can’t perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and I’ve had to rent our house in Manhattan and park my little family the year round in our shingle villa in Bar Harbor, inadequately heated for a Maine winter, where we can gaze out the windows at the cold gray Atlantic and envy our departed summer neighbors, tucked away cozily in their southern homes.

  But I must say about Grinnell and the children that although they left the decisions to me, they never complained. Grinnell insisted that cross-country skiing, which he can do in Maine, was the sport in which he had always wished to indulge, and the twins, Elfrida and Damon, now thirty and cheerfully unemployed, were equally content, Elfrida with her watercolors and Damon with the opportunity to get on with that novel he was always going to write.

  My mother-in-law, typically, managed to keep her New York apartment open so that she was spared the rigor of Maine winters. Much later, on her demise, we learned that she had done it by spending all the capital that might have come to my children. Really, she and Grinnell’s maiden sisters were incomparable. Serene in their smugness and fatuity, confident that their Colonial blood was envied by all (actually, my family was much better) and proud of what they called the Scott “pluck” (they would pale at the sight of a cockroach), they counted on me to ingratiate myself with the new rich of Bar Harbor, when summer came, and marry off Elfrida and Damon to advantage. But would they help? Heavens, no! They would not lower themselves to meet the newcomers and did not hesitate to look down on me for being able to do the job on which they counted but the mechanics of which they despised—and congratulated themselves for despising! For would a lady, a real lady, care as I had to care about clothes and looks and ingratiating manners? Of course not!

  And I must admit that they are not wholly incorrect in their judgment of me. I do use people. My only real resentment of my in-laws is that they expect to profit from the dirty water into which they decline to stick a finger. It is I who must handle the new rich with whom they don’t care to associate. And, of course, I have learned how to do that. I am well aware of how social climbers make use of summer resorts, which represent the soft underbelly of the old guard. In their hometowns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia—the established families are more or less secure in their guarded citadels: the clubs, the private schools, the subscription dances, even some of the major charities. But at a watering place like Newport, Bar Harbor or Southampton the new tycoon (provided he is not too repellently vulgar, as a surprising number are) can attract the children of the old guard to play with his children by offering them the use of yachts, fast foreign cars, well-kept tennis courts and other luxuries, and once the younger generation has been lured in, the parents are almost bound to call, and the fortifications are breached. Marriages between the old and new soon guarantee total acceptance, and the battle is won.

  But there are pitfalls for those who, like myself, are bent on hastening the process. A member of the old guard must not surrender too quickly; it will be assumed that he or she is a phoney, not the real thing. And, secondly, the friendship “that you finally offer a newcomer must be sincere. After all, these people, even if they need polish, are not stupid. They wouldn’t have made their millions if they were. And, like other people, they want to be loved. And this is not always impossible. Take Mrs. Oscar Gleason, my prize capture, widow of the rubber tycoon whose mammoth fortune was rumored to be derived in good part from contraceptives. I admired and respected this grave and regal dowager from the beginning and was genuinely amused, as were so many others, by her six handsome if rather madcap children. Indeed, I think I can say truly that I came to love that family.

  My own family (as opposed to my in-laws) proved useful allies. Good-natured and essentially democratic, my husband and son and daughter made friends easily with everyone on the island. In fact, I doubt that Grinnell made any distinction in his mind between the old stock and the new. His athletic prowess and easygoing manner shed a beam of light about him, and the business moguls could admire his muscle and enjoy his sometimes naive amiability without envying his brain. It rather fascinated them that he had never worked, and his explanation of this was much repeated at the swimming club. He had worked, he told them, for a year after his graduation from Harvard, as a customers’ man in a Wall Street brokerage house, but when he discovered that he and his chauffeur had the same salary, he decided to drive himself and be free of toil. This, I may say, was typical of Grinnell. He never read a book, but he wrote one, a short collection of fishing stories, and had it privately and too expensively published, with the placating dedication “to Kate, my companion in the adventure of life.” One could forgive him anything, even a bromide. And one always did.

  Elfrida was a lovely but passive young woman, perfectly content to be idle, except when painting her mild little pictures, and oddly indifferent to masculine attention. There was not much chance of lassoing a young heir for her, but I knew that if I got an heiress for Damon, he would always look after his twin. Damon was my ace of trumps. Everyone loved him. He was slight but beautifully built, with dark eyes and hair, romantically good-looking and a fine athlete, though nothing like his father. The few things that he consented to do he did well—tennis, golf and bridge—but he was regrettably lazy and spent hours in the summer stretched out on the porch, acquiring a perfect tan. He appeared to have no ambition and seemed perfectly happy to depend on the small trust fund he had inherited from his grandfather to guard him from industry. Although he lived with me, he did not live on me, insisting that I take a good half of his small income for his maintenance. That was like him.

  The great thing about Damon was his character. He was the essence of amiability and kindness to everyone, and especially to me. He and I discussed everything that I could not discuss with his dear but easily distracted father; we thought alike and felt alike and laughed alike. I guess it’s sufficiently obvious that Damon was the love of my life.

  There had been times, of course, when I tried to persuade him to work, but there was a stubbornness in his quiet insistence on a life of temperate hedonism that I at last came to realize I was not going to overcome. It was I who would have to arrange for his future; nobody else would do it, least of all himself. He had, as I say, his own small means, but if I should die, and my heart is not strong, he would give it to his father and sister whenever they needed it, which would be often. And even if
they didn’t, it was not enough for him to marry on, and I couldn’t bear the idea of his never having a family of his own. Needless to say there were plenty of girls in Bar Harbor who had fallen in love with him, but so far he seemed to have avoided any serious entanglement. There was one woman with whom he enjoyed a deep and lasting friendship, but she was his slightly older first cousin, my niece Leila Bryce, a bright and attractive woman, a Catholic convert who had found herself locked into a miserable marriage with a dissolute and faithless husband from whom she was now separated. I am sure that there were people who raised their eyebrows at Damon and Leila’s long intimacy, but he always implied that she was simply another sister to him.

  No, if Damon was to marry, it would have to be to an heiress, and as there was not a mercenary bone in his body, it would be up to me to find one for him. Marjorie Gleason was an almost too obvious choice; she was the oldest, prettiest and most lively of my friend Florence’s brood and a devoted friend of Damon’s. They had even won the swimming club’s bridge tournament as partners.

  As I have said, I did not consider Damon’s friendship with my niece Leila an impediment to my project, but to be sure there were no ambushes lurking in those woods, I put it before her one morning at the swimming club. Leila had come out of the pool and joined me on a stone bench by the water, pulling off her rubber cap and shaking her head to fluff out her lovely blond hair. I admired her glistening wet body, her handsome tanned features and her sympathetic brown eyes, regretting as always that this fine woman, so svelte and youthful-looking at thirty-five, should have tied herself up to the wrong man.

  “You know, Aunt Kate, I’ve had the same idea!” she responded with what certainly sounded like sincerity. “It’s high time that Damon got married, and Marjorie Gleason is just the girl he needs. And I’ve a hunch it won’t be too hard to pull off. I’m pretty sure she has a crush on him. But remember, Auntie, don’t push too hard! We all have a tendency to shy away from any match Mama favors. Maybe a few nice remarks about Marjorie, well placed, will be enough.”