A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read online

  I agreed, and before our meal was finished we happed upon the old rumors of Jimmy Regan's sexual tastes.

  "Of course, even the faculty heard those rumors," he told me. "One day he invited me to go into Boston with him for a concert. We would spend the night at his club there, the Somerset. He drove me in his big Cadillac, and after the concert we went to his room where we undressed and got into our pajamas. He then placed a bottle of gin on the table between our beds. Now, I thought, if he ever tries anything, this will be it. We had a drink and went to sleep. Nothing happened."

  Nor do I think anything ever did. Jimmy Regan was a good and conscientious man. He did not believe that pedophilia was proper conduct for a teacher of male youth, and he was never going to give into its urges. Others might have different views; that did not concern him. What he was given to do in this life, he would do perfectly and that was all that need concern him. If he occasionally let himself show a trifle too much affection for a fine-looking youth, it could not possibly do the latter any harm, for even if the boy was not one to reject a same-sex relationship, he certainly would not choose one with a small, wispy old man.

  At last, after a dormitory party in which my every extremity was covered with flung ice cream, there was a lull in my persecution. The evening was broken up by the arrival of the kindly dorm master who rescued me and sent the others to bed. Then he helped me look for my dental biteplate, which had been lost in the fray. I told him it had cost my parents $100, an astronomic sum, and for the first time I burst into racking sobs. He was kind to me as nobody had been, found my biteplate, put his arm around my shoulders, and sent me to bed almost consoled. (He was the same man compelled to leave Groton after his letters to the handsome boy, but I always recall him with the deepest affection.)

  As I have said, a lull now followed, as it seemed my persecution had begun to bore its leaders. I even picked up one or two friends. Then I had an aggravated case of tonsillitis and had to go home for a couple of months, and finally it was, blessedly, summer. I behaved as I had been, by example, taught. That is, I made no mention of my unhappiness. Not a single complaint about school was directed to my parents during the long hot months, and they had no reason to think that things weren't going well, except that my marks were poor. My father was a graduate of the school himself and under the same headmaster, but he would have taken me out of Groton in a moment had he suspected the truth. He was a rare thing, a jock who never reproached his son for not being one.

  My mother suspected that all was not well for me at school and spotted the redness on my tongue in September when it was time to go back to the seat of my torture. I had smeared it with Mercurochrome in an effort to make myself ill so that I could stay home. Not surprisingly, given my mother's perspicacity, it didn't work. But on this occasion, perhaps chastened by the previous year, I didn't dare confess. The redness was attributed to something I ate, and I was duly returned to Groton as a second former.

  A new problem awaited me. My Latin teacher, Fritz DeVeau, a dry, sarcastic bachelor of independent means (he spent his summers in Bar Harbor where his wit and acid realism made him popular even with my parents) filled me for some reason with a paralyzing awe. I was not doing well in Latin anyway, but I was hopeless when translating for him. He would give me a daily zero on a recitation, simply commenting: "Another goose egg, Auchincloss." It was said mockingly in the class that my marks looked like a chain across the page. This affected me in other classes, and the faculty actually began to discuss the advisability of my repeating a year. Mother came to discuss it.

  The idea of adding a whole year to my Groton sentence of six filled me with a wild terror. I would literally have preferred death. But in my desperation I conceived a plan of escape.

  "Get me dropped from 2A Latin to 2B," I begged Mother, "and I think I can make it."

  Mother, reluctant as perhaps never before to interfere (perhaps even she was cowed by Groton's hallowed halls) with the school administration, recognized the extent of my misery. She brought herself to tackle the formidable and veteran headmaster, who told her that my teachers believed I was simply lazy.

  "But what can we really lose?" she argued, attempting to advance my plan. "He seems morbidly terrified at the idea of repeating a year."

  God bless her; it worked. I knew it was a great concession, and I was resolved to make good. Like a drowning man clutching the lifesaver that had been finally tossed to him I fought my way to the shore. I entered the classroom of 2B Latin and was greeted by its master, Mr. Andrews, a stout, dumpy, funny-looking middle-aged man who had been promoted to the faculty from being the headmaster's secretary and whose face bore a huge purple birthmark. But—forgive the cliché—he had a heart of the purest gold.

  "I hear you've come down to us because you're lazy," he said. Then he winked at me.

  How I loved that man! My marks turned around.

  In the following year my grades soared from the bottom of the class to the top, and I was returned to the aegis of the once terrible DeVeau, who now appeared to have been a paper tiger and, indeed, became a friend.

  I had finally found a chink in the Groton wall through which I could crawl, if not to any great popularity, at least to the respectability of high marks. I could now afford to eliminate all hated sports from my life except for the minimum required by the school schedule. At home I continued to enjoy a game of tennis, but the only spectator sport I ever indulged in was the bull fight, on a rare visit to Spain or Mexico, and this I soon gave up as too bloody. But the unfortunate effect on my personality was that I allowed myself to consider this turning of my back on athletics as the sign of a superiority of character, and I made something of an ass of myself at Groton by not attending matches with visiting teams and scorning any manifestation of "school spirit."

  This led, at one point, to a clash with my roommate, Bill Bundy. He and his younger brother, McGeorge, would later become world famous as security advisers to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and ardent supporters of the Vietnam War. In fact, they earned from David Halberstam the ironical title of "the best and the brightest," despite the fact it was they who helped plunge us into disaster.

  Well, returning from the Groton library where I had spent a Saturday afternoon not attending a football game with a visiting team, which we had lost, I found Bill actually in tears over the defeat. Foolishly I mocked him, and he was so angry that he arranged to have a new roommate. We made it up later, but it was not the best way for me to make friends.

  Although McGeorge was in a lower form, he was the younger brother who became the better friend of mine. Both brothers shared an intense feeling about internecine sport, and I have sometimes wondered if the spirit of "Groton must not lose" did not play a role in their reluctance to face defeat in an unwinnable and unnecessary war.

  Mac, as president of the dramatic society, chose for his annual play Shakespeare's Henry V, of which he seemed entirely to accept the conventional interpretation that it is a hymn to patriotic and military glory.

  But this was only so far as the king is depicted in his heroic speeches. The faculty coach, Malcolm Strachan, who believed that Shakespeare was seeking secretly to convey his own pacifist credo in the lines of the clowns, persuaded Mac that it would make a more interesting production to portray both interpretations. At any rate, what stood out was Mac's splendid acting as Henry V glorifying a totally aggressive war. I cannot help but note that it is recorded that, in difficult moments of the Vietnamese conflict, Mac recited some of the speeches he remembered from Henry V to LBJ.

  ***

  When I was president of the dramatics club, the year before Mac, I should have had the lead in the play chosen, Moliere's The Would-be Gentleman. Yet my cousin Gordon Auchincloss—last seen in non-theatrical circumstances—was considered better for the part. This was disappointing, and I had to content myself with the secondary role of Dorante, but much worse was to follow. In my principal scene with the elegant marquise Doriméne, I clumsily sat on the edg
e of a curtain dropping to the stage. So tight did I pull it that the audience feared it would come down, and so missed all the words.

  9. Religion

  I CANNOT RECALL that religion played any important role in my life until I went to Groton School at the age of twelve. The Auchinclosses, being of Scottish origin, were naturally Presbyterians, and in my grandfather Auchincloss's generation very strict and sober ones.

  My grandmother Auchincloss, of English descent, born a Russell of New York and Newport, belonged to the more fashionable Episcopal church, but as a dutiful spouse, she accompanied her husband on Sundays to his Presbyterian temple. Unlike him, as it happened, she was very devout, though it did the poor lady little good at the end when she died in an agony created by the fear of hell's fire. Her ending confirmed my father in his lifelong antipathy to religion.

  "I never knew ease of conscience and independence of mind," he told me once, "until I wrapped up religion once and for all and threw it in the East River."

  Yet a more moral and honorable man never drew breath. He taught me that there was no necessary connection between Christian faith and Christian conduct.

  ***

  As children we often accompanied Mother to church on Sunday while Father played golf. She was interested in religion, but as a part of philosophy in which she was widely read; it never seemed to answer an emotional need in her. For her offspring the celebration of religion was pretty well confined to the sentimentality of the Christmas story. My older brother, whom I much admired, made no secret of his firm atheism, and when I asked him if he didn't even believe in an afterlife, he assured me that I might survive just long enough to hear his mocking laugh.

  At Groton, the massive personality of Endicott Peabody, then in his late seventies and known as the Rector, dominated the campus. He had founded the school half a century before. My father and half the fathers of my classmates had been his students; they were as much in awe of him as we were. There was no appeal, at least in our minds, from his decrees. We came almost to identify him with the deity whom he so passionately and articulately adored. To doubt any article of his creed would seem an impertinence to an absolute authority.

  Ultimately I came to recognize that the rector had a benignant side, that his love of the school he had created was genuine, and that his concern reached out to every boy under his jurisdiction. Watching him praying strongly aloud in chapel, one noticed how his eyes sometimes closed, how his great body almost quivered with emotion. It was hard to believe that God did not hear him or carefully consider his positions. A species of minor but sentimental religious ecstasy was born in me at this period.

  I decided with the sanction (or was it the indifference?) of my parents to be confirmed into the Episcopal church, because, of course, the rector would do the confirming, and I attended his conferences on the subject where he gave to each boy present his unmistakable personal attention.

  Greedy to be singled out by the great man, I would ask questions in the answers to which I had no real interest, such as: Was it sanitary for so many to sip wine from the same communion cup? I simply wanted that large balding head turned in my direction and that intense gray-eyed stare fixed on my puny self as I heard the grave response: "Others have been concerned about that, my boy. You may have noticed that after each communicant has drunk I give the cup a strong wipe with my napkin."

  After my confirmation I remained a believer until my graduation from Groton. I had no trouble with the creed. I said my prayers at night, and I rose early to attend Holy Communion on Sundays, which was celebrated before the school breakfast. But one day a friend of mine, a deeply thoughtful Boston boy whom I much admired, Sam Shaw, suggested, as we happened to be walking past the then-empty chapel, that we enter and sit there for a bit. We did so for perhaps a quarter of an hour. When we came out, Sam said, "That was fine, wasn't it?" And it had been fine, though I knew that Sam embraced no religion whatsoever. Nor has he ever subsequently. Yet our little visit struck me then and still does as a deeply religious moment.

  Later I would return to the family Presbyterianism, but my faith was largely gone, and never really came back, even in some tight moments during the war. I came to share the amiable agnosticism of so many of my contemporaries and endeavored to live up to their moral code. I found the Christian sexual taboos unnecessary.

  I played for a time the sophomoric game of picking holes in the gospel, correcting the predictions and doubting the miracles, but ended by rejecting the virgin birth and settling for the theory, tacitly held, I believe, by millions of so-called Christians, that Jesus was simply a gifted mortal. I could never even give the church credit for good lives; it seemed to me that it valued faith above all, and I couldn't see why it was virtuous to believe in a god and sinful not to. I could quite see, however, why it was important for a church that we should.

  What I could never quite eliminate from my evaluations of the religions of the world was the death and mayhem that they had inflicted on people who questioned their creeds. It seems that as soon as the banner of a new faith has been firmly planted in converted soil, its priesthood invents savage punishment for heresy.

  It's all very well to argue that, at least in the case of the worshippers of Christ, physical retribution has been abolished, but it took force to make the churches agree, and they have retained the concept of hell to let them perpetrate in the hereafter what they can no longer accomplish on earth.

  I recall a performance of Verdi's Don Carlos at the Metropolitan Opera where the auto-da-fe scene was brilliantly and effectively staged. The condemned heretics marched glumly across the stage toward the explosion of light in the wings representing the fire that awaited them. Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, famous Catholic convert, in the box next to mine audibly protested. I had the impression that it was the representation of the past rather than its condemnation that really upset her.

  How far back in the past was burning still an acceptable form of execution in supposedly civilized countries? I believe a woman was burned alive for the murder of her husband in England in one of the first years of the nineteenth century. And it is possible to put ourselves in the mind of long-dead people who, with perfect complacency, did things of hideous cruelty, if those things happen to be described by a vivid and sympathetic writer.

  Take Madame de Sevigne, for example, who wrote such copious letters to her beloved daughter. It is hard not to love a woman so kind, so witty, so seemingly humane and sensible, so like the finest women of our own day. But what is this that we encounter? The marquise is going along with a family plan to enhance her grandson's inheritance and his chance for an advantageous matrimonial match by transferring his sister's dowry to him and locking up for life the poor little robbed thing in a convent!

  "Oh, she will be quite comfortable there," the grandmother coolly opines. "The abbess is her aunt." "On est la niece de Madame!"

  ***

  Saying all this brings me to the question of what influence Christianity had on my contemporaries at Groton and later. I don't think very much. Few as adults even attended divine services, and only two became priests. We heard, it was true, of a devout group of boys at Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and one who became a Trappist monk, but this was rare. Was the Ivy League of my day then a godless one? Perhaps so, but it certainly did not lack ideals.

  I used to say to my father: "If my classmates should ever run this country all would be well." The irony of my life is that they did indeed have a hand in it. And every one of them was a fervent backer of the war in Vietnam.

  10. The Great Depression

  MY SIX YEARS at Groton, 1930–1935, coincided closely with those of the Great Depression, but the Great Crash of 1929, which devastated our world, affected my family little, though we had reason to regret the move we had just made to a splendid penthouse on the highest point of Park Avenue. I was completely absorbed by boarding school and essentially unaware of the outside world until I had to go home to have my tonsils out. I ne
eded a tutor to make up for lost school time, and Mother asked me if there was anyone from the old Bovee faculty I would like. The school was terminated; the teachers were all out of work.

  "Oh, I'd love Mr. Evans, but you'd never get him."

  "Oh, I think I might."

  And poor, dear Mr. Evans duly appeared, looking sad and gaunt. Mother, leaving for her day, told me to be sure to ask him to stay for lunch. I forgot, and when she returned and found him gone she was irritated.

  "Why was it so important?" I wanted to know.

  "Because he's hungry!"

  ***

  During these difficult times, Father remained a member of the Davis Polk firm, and there was always an income to be gleaned from the financing and reorganization of the great corporations it represented. When things were so bad that the older members had to reduce their percentages of the take, they would do as John Davis instructed them. He would take each older partner aside and say, if to Father, "Howland, we old farts have to move over a bit."

  Sometimes, as Father put it, when the figures came out, it would be apparent that only one old fart had moved over, but that was all right. Davis's charm and the eminence of his political and legal career lent weight to his decisions for the firm. In a brilliant but competitive partnership it was always helpful to have a strong leader.

  In the early years of the Depression, there came a time when Father was seriously concerned, without validity, about a corporate bond issue that he had approved: Would the firm have to buy it in? Would he survive financially? Then his father, John W. Auchincloss, lost the bulk of his fortune on the stock market, and my father's siblings blamed him unfairly for not guiding the doddering old man with a firmer hand. My poor parents had a nervous crackup, and we didn't know where we were at. Despite my sympathies for the disadvantaged, I sometimes think economic insecurity is most taxing when sudden and when its victims are least accustomed to bearing it.