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    Tales of Yesteryear
    Tales of Yesteryear
    Tales of Yesteryear
    Ebook252 pages6 hours

    Tales of Yesteryear

    By Louis Auchincloss

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The author of False Gods and winner of the National Medal of Arts offers eight stories looking into the lives of the wealthy—but troubled—elite.

    Set in various decades throughout twentieth century, this entertaining short story collection reveals the inner lives of America’s upper classes in the polished, elegant prose that is Louis Auchincloss’s signature. The intricate balance of power in a marriage, the artist’s hunger for inspiration, the responsibilities of privileged youth on the eve of war—Auchincloss casts a knowing yet sympathetic eye on such dilemmas as they play themselves out in the salons, clubs, boarding schools, Park Avenue drawing rooms, and summer hideaways of the moneyed classes.

    In “The Man of Good Will,” an aging Seth Middletown finds himself unable to save a beloved grandson torn apart by the sixties — a boy carefully protected from a family secret. Dick and Joyce Emmons, in “The Lotos Eaters,” are surprised to find their new marriage subtly undermined by their own enchanted existence on a paradisal Florida island. A theatrical grande dame and an admiring young actor are “Priestess and Acolyte” —until they realize that the passions that rule them are irreconcilable.

    Evident on every page of the eight stories contained here are Auchincloss’s superb ear for dialogue and his ability to suggest what lies beneath the surface of human relationships. Tales of Yesteryear will give Auchincloss’s loyal readers cause to rejoice, and newcomers a delightful introduction to one of America's most distinguished authors.

    Praise for Tales of Yesteryear

    “His word is as graceful and insightful as it’s ever been. These eight stories, with their familiar social types and elegant settings, are vintage Auchincloss: moral tales that resonate with the history of our times, albeit from the top down . . . . Auchincloss belongs among the masters of American short fiction, as this volume demonstrates.” —Kirkus Reviews

    “Auchincloss’s keen social observation, pitch-perfect dialogue and gift for dramatic confrontation are as effective as ever.” —Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 7, 2014
    ISBN9780544357006
    Tales of Yesteryear
    Author

    Louis Auchincloss

    In 2000, Louis Auchincloss was honored as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.

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      Book preview

      Tales of Yesteryear - Louis Auchincloss

      title page

      Contents

      Title Page

      Contents

      Copyright

      Dedications

      The Man of Good Will

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      6

      7

      8

      They That Have Power to Hurt

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      The Lotos Eaters

      1

      2

      3

      The Renwick Steles

      The Poetaster

      1

      2

      3

      4

      5

      To My Beloved Wife . . .

      1

      2

      3

      4

      A Day and Then a Night

      1

      2

      3

      4

      Priestess and Acolyte

      1

      2

      About the Author

      Connect with HMH

      Copyright © 1994 by Louis Auchincloss

      All rights reserved

      For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

      hmhbooks.com

      The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

      Auchincloss, Louis.

      Tales of yesteryear / Louis Auchincloss.

      p. cm.

      ISBN 0-395-69132-x

      1. Upper classes—United States—Fiction. I. Title.

      PS3501.U25T35 1994

      813’.54—dc20    93-33757

      CIP

      eISBN 978-0-544-35700-6

      v2.0521

      Excerpt from Eleanora Duse from What’s O’Clock by Amy Lowell. Copyright 1925, copyright © renewed 1950 by Ada D. Russell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

      FOR SCHUYLER CHAPIN

      AND IN MEMORY OF BETTY

      The Man of Good Will

      1

      SETH MIDDLETON was more content at noon at his club, the Patroons, more at his ease, more in symbiotic relationship with the small portion of human society in which his lot had been cast, than in the semiretirement of his Wall Street law office or even in his beloved rose garden high over the grey waters of Cold Spring Harbor, in Long Island, where he could sit and play (a harmless old man’s game) the benevolent, twinkling oracle to visiting grandchildren, interrupted, only when he waxed too exuberant, by Marjorie’s dry put-downs. Such a preference for his fraternity, he would insist, hardly made him a male chauvinist. It was simply, was it not, that there was an unduplicatable camaraderie among those of his male contemporaries (or near contemporaries, as the former, in their seventies, were tending to drop away) who shared, more or less, his own general philosophy and outlook?

      The real thing, Marjorie had once pointed out to their daughters, is that your father is worshipped at the Patroons. It’s the kind of adulation no man can get from a woman unless she’s a dunce or a hypocrite, or both.

      Seth had always been aware that his wife saw him with unclouded eyes, and he was grateful that such asperities were mercifully rare, catching him though they did at unguarded moments, as if on a scamper down the corridor from the bathroom clad only in a towel. And deeply devoted husband as he was, he could still be secretly pleased that Marjorie could never cross the threshhold of the Patroons except on ladies’ night.

      Of course there were already, in these turbulent ’sixties, voices being raised in favor of the admission of women to the club, and while he had some sympathy with the argument that the other sex might be deprived of professional opportunities by its exclusion from certain male enclaves, he insisted that the Patroons did no business at all behind their protective walls, that theirs was simply a place where gentlemen of intellectual tastes could meet in the cool, dark, leathery atmosphere of frayed furniture and much thumbed periodicals, under Victorian genre paintings and dusky examples of the Hudson School, with a freedom hardly compatible with the higher decibels, the brisker interchange and even the admittedly better taste of women. Was it a sin to hold that each sex had something special to contribute to its members in occasional isolation? Certainly Marjorie had no wish to see him in her beloved Cosmopolitan Club.

      But, alas, what sort of greeting would he get this day at noon, on this fine spring day in the third year of the grisly conflict in Viet Nam, from his cohorts gathered at the round table for the preprandial libation, after the Times‘s article on Mark’s comments on his forthcoming graduation from his Connecticut college?

      Don’t go to the club today, dear, Marjorie had urged him.

      But he had felt it a duty. These men looked to him for candor, for reassurance, for a touching of hands in the darkening twilight of old age. Did he not look to them for the same? As he took his seat and picked up the gin cocktail which Eric, the bartender, had mixed as soon as he spotted Seth’s mound of grey hair rising on the stairway below, he noted a certain quickening in the muttered welcome around the board. He waited.

      Well, your grandson certainly made us sit up this morning, Seth! I assume it was only the pyrotechnics of youth.

      I wouldn’t worry about it, Seth, said another. "My wife has a young nephew who talks the same way. It’s all for publicity. What is it that Canadian guy, McLuhan, says? Truth is what people think at a particular time? Not what they do. Nothing actually ever happens."

      I’m sorry, gentlemen, came a third voice. I haven’t seen the paper today. What did Seth’s grandson say? Or do? Or what are we supposed to think he did?

      Seth turned benignly to the last questioner. "It was Mark Storey, my daughter Angelica’s son. My only male grandchild, in fact. He’s ‘agin’ everything. But he’s a bright kid, and handsome, too; flashy-eyed, raven-haired, very attractive to the girls. A Times roving reporter has been doing pieces on New England graduating classes. He interviewed Mark and others at his fraternity. There must have been quite a crowd there and a lot of drinking, I guess. And pot, too. Anyway, when he asked Mark what he intended to do after graduation, he said he wanted to kill himself."

      There was a silence around the table.

      Just bluff, wasn’t it, Seth?

      Seth nodded slowly. One must assume so. The reporter did. He didn’t take Mark seriously. He even made a joke of it, and some of Mark’s fraternity mates struck the same note. It was a bit like a crowd chanting ‘Jump! Jump!’ to the man on the window ledge. I didn’t like that, of course, but I have a lot of faith in Mark. Even if he does call me the ‘bought mouthpiece of the vested interests.’

      Oh, no! Not to your face, surely?

      Oh, yes, and that’s when he’s being complimentary. I wouldn’t care to repeat some of his other descriptions here. Seth turned now to Ralph Sachs, the pundit of Everywhere magazine. Why are they so down on us, Ralph?

      Because they think we’re mad. The imperialist in the past wanted to conquer the world. Today he wants to blow it up. As they see it, anyway.

      Seth rubbed his brow in perplexity. The war may be a mistake, but I’m damned if I see why it’s imperialistic. We don’t want anything in either Viet Nam. We want the south to be free, that’s all. Why is that a crime?

      Who said a blunder was worse?

      And then they all turned, with evident relief, from the dangerous topic of Mark to the less dangerous one of the war, and the same old differing points of view were all presented, from escalation to de-escalation, with an escalating sharpness quite uncharacteristic of the usual club discussions.

      But Seth was not listening. He was thinking of Mark. He believed that the war had merely intensified in the young man a state of anxiety which had long preceded it. Mark had already been on drugs when it began; he had actually been kicked out of Chelton School for that. And even before the drugs he had insisted on seeing contemporary society as a moral wasteland.

      Angelica and her husband, Sam, had long despaired of Mark, and the sombre youth, enfranchised by a small trust fund, had seemed only too grimly satisfied at the pass to which he had brought them. Indeed, it sometimes appeared to be only his grandfather’s persistent efforts to reason with him, Seth’s refusal to accept the boy’s secession from society, that kept Mark in touch with his family at all. But why, Seth wondered with a catch at his heart so painful that he wondered for a moment if he had betrayed himself to the chattering table, should it have been ordained that he, in his senescence, should still find rewards in living in a world where a healthy young man found only dust and ashes?

      He could suddenly sit there no longer. They were gabbling like old fools, wrangling over a destiny that the contemptuous young had abandoned to them. With a brusqueness unlike him, he quit the table and then the club.

      At home he found Marjorie in the front hall, turning over the mail. He sought immediate comfort in the firm stockiness of her short figure, in the uncompromising sobriety of her dress, even in the gleam of scalp under her thinning grey hair. She had none of his doubts, or if she did, she hid them. She came from Boston; indeed, she had never left it. She always tried to stand between her husband and the inevitable disillusionment which awaited what she regarded as his weak male optimism.

      That was a quick lunch.

      You were right. I shouldn’t have gone there. Can I have a sandwich here?

      Nellie will make you one. I’m going out. She put on her hat without looking at herself in the hall mirror. "Try not to fret, dear. It won’t help you. Or Mark."

      Marjorie, I’m grateful to you.

      Whatever for?

      For never having once, in all these years, said, ‘I told you so.’

      About what, for heaven’s sake?

      Ah, but that session at the club had really pushed him far! He was ready for anything now. About my shoving poor Sam into Angelica’s calculated embrace.

      Oh, Lordy me! But her tone was more of impatience than shock. What do you think I am, a fiend? Anyway, they’ve been good enough for each other. It wasn’t that bad a match. And you can’t blame Mark on his parents.

      "I don’t. I blame him on me. But I keep reminding myself that he may have inherited at least some part of your character. That should get him through, if nothing else does."

      "Speriamo!"

      And Marjorie. I think I’ll drive up to Connecticut this Sunday and lunch with him.

      He not infrequently went up to the little town of Mark’s college and took him out for a good lunch at a local inn.

      I wouldn’t if I were you. I’d leave the boy alone. To show him you weren’t scared. But then I’m not you.

      And now she did leave. Watching her descend the brownstone stoop, he was horribly afraid that what she was really thinking was that his basic mistake had been in preventing Angelica from aborting Mark. But at least she would never say it.

      2

      On his Sunday visits to Mark, Seth liked to start early enough to arrive in time for the morning service in the college chapel. There was no idea, of course, of Mark’s joining him. He preferred anyway to be alone in church.

      He was an Episcopalian. It was not that he regarded its creed as the true one; he credited no faith as a sole key to mysteries into which he had no curiosity to penetrate. But its rites were measured, soothing and colorful; he loved the melodious phrases of the old Jacobean bishops: Hear what comfortable words our saviour Christ saith unto all who truly turn to him, or In my Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so I would have told you. Indeed, he was not ashamed to own that such faith as he had might not survive the least revision of the King James version.

      And as his own father, the beloved old editor of a famed family periodical, had liked to point out, Episcopalianism was not stained by any spasms of vulgar evangelism, nor did its ministers, like Catholic priests, intrude upon your private life with tiresome and even impudent comminations. It rather provided a ceremony for rest and receuillement at the end of a busy week, a welcome caesura for the proper scanning of a line in the good life.

      But that morning nothing seemed to work. The hymns crawled with laudations. What was this greedy deity whose vanity had to be soothed with eternal hosannas? And the young minister’s sermon was disquietingly mystical. He spoke eerily of a union with God. How was it possible, Seth thought fretfully, for any human being to derive satisfaction from the concept of such a blending, presumably at the sacrifice of his own personality? He had always shied away from thoughts of an afterlife. The idea of extinction was obnoxious enough, but that of survival was in some ways worse. For might there not be accounts to be settled? Why should he, unlike millions, have been allowed with impunity to enjoy so long and so intensely his habitation of the planet Earth?

      Was something like that not on Mark’s mind?

      He rose and left the church. He found his grandson reading alone in his pleasant dormitory single room, hung with travel posters of French cathedrals and châteaux. Mark never betrayed pleasure or even surprise at his ancestor’s arrival. He treated Seth as casually as he would have a classmate dropping in for a chat.

      What’s the book?

      "Sebastian van Storck. By Walter Pater. Do you know it?" When Seth shook his head, Mark proceeded, with his customary deliberation, to expound the plot. It involved a young Dutch aristocrat of the seventeenth century who believed that the only purpose in life was in its extinction, that the live spirit in all forms of finite existence was doomed at last to be snuffed out, giving place to nullity. Mark then read this passage aloud:

      ‘For him, Sebastian, that one abstract being was as the pale arctic sun, disclosing itself over the dead level of a glacial, a barren and absolutely lonely sea. The lively pupose of life had been frozen out of it. What he must admire, and love if he could, was equilibrium," the void, the tabula rasa, into which, through all those apparent energies of man and nature which, in truth, are but forces of disintegration, the world was really settling.’"

      But even if all that is true, Seth protested with a shudder, shouldn’t we try to enjoy ourselves in the meantime?

      "But, Grandpa, don’t you see? That’s just what I am doing! My enjoyment is in seeing the truth. Even if I’m the only one who does. What would not be enjoyable would be to believe that man was wonderful, noble, great, if you will, and yet still doomed to extinction."

      So that those of us who believe in the greatness of man—or at least in his potential greatness—and who try to persuade others to believe in it, are doing them no favor?

      That’s how I see it, yes.

      And that’s how you see me when I come up here? As an officious proselytizer?

      Oh, I don’t say you’re officious. But you’re certainly a proselytizer, Grandpa. One of the worst. You’re always trying to put a fair face on things. A false face. I prefer the skull. He grinned. The grinning skull!

      How do I put a false face on things?

      Look, Grandpa. Let’s not go on with this. I don’t want to hurt you. What’s the use of that?

      "But I want to find out. Isn’t that right, by your standards? Isn’t that facing the truth?"

      Mark reflected and at last nodded. Very well. If you really want to know. Remember. You asked for it. Let me put it this way. Again he paused to think. You’re always cleaning things up. You think your rich clients make up for their piracy by creating foundations. You believe that letting witnesses tell lies or semi-lies in a courtroom is the best way of finding out truth. And of course you maintain that any amount of blowing up of other nations is justified if its purpose is to bring down dictators. And so you go, on and on, until you’ve half-convinced yourself you’ve conquered the ape in man!

      Seth found himself reflecting how far the young man had gone in bridging the double generational gap. It was as if he and Mark were standing on a broad plain with nothing, even equality, between them.

      But, my dear boy, these ideas are all mere approximations. Rough tools, if you will, to build some kind of shelter against bleak, cold facts. I never claimed to have all the answers.

      I realize that, Grandpa. But I’m talking about your effect on other people. You’re always urging them to scramble into one of your shelters.

      Is it so great to be out in the cold?

      It’s honest, anyway.

      And can’t it be honest to be happy? Look, Mark. Why not count your blessings, for a change? No, I don’t care if I sound old hat. You’re young and healthy and well-to-do. And you’re a citizen of the richest and most democratic nation on earth.

      Whose founding father was a slaveholder.

      But whose real father was Lincoln.

      There you go, Grandpa. There’s your old washing machine at work again.

      Your mother used to talk like that. But she came to terms with life.

      You mean by giving up living. For cards and clothes and dinner parties.

      You’re hard on her. You can’t know as I did what she saved herself from. She was the most reckless debutante of her year. There was something almost suicidal in the way she drank and carried on. And then along came your father and changed her whole life. Believe me, it was better.

      Sam Storey changed plenty of things, I gather. Including the basic character of your and his law firm. Was that better, too, Grandpa? I know you hated it! From the summer I worked there. One of the old guard lawyers told me what a different place it had been in your day. Less hard-boiled.

      I was afraid you’d say it was more honest to be hard-boiled. Seth was touched by this hint of the boy’s sympathy with what had been his own disillusionment. Might that sympathy not be the only hold anyone still had on him? But why did you refer to your father that way? By his name, I mean. Is that some new fashion of the emancipated son?

      No. Mark rose and went to the window. The back that he turned to Seth was suddenly defiant. "I referred to him that way because he’s not my father. He allowed a silence to underscore the point. Don’t pretend to be surprised, Grandpa. He said you knew all about it."

      Seth’s lips and tongue were dry, his mind an echoing chamber. Ever since the break between Mark and his parents he had been dreading that his son-in-law would be goaded into this

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