Her Infinite Variety - Hardcover

Louis Auchincloss was honored in the year 2000 as a "Living Landmark" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. He has written more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resides in New York City.

1

Violet longcope had, from the earliest signs of her
daughter's incipient beauty, drilled into Clarabel's lovely head the
warning that a single unwary submission of the heart to the wrong
male charm could throw a girl perhaps irretrievably off the smooth
tracks of the best laid life plan. The warning was all the more
necessary for a girl raised not only in a university town but in the
very heart of a university. Pierpont in 1937 was the newest of the
colleges in Yale's new college plan, and Violet's husband, Irving
Longcope, was its popular master. Their residence, forming a corner
of the creamy square Gothic edifice, ornamented with ugly pediments
and narrow mullioned windows, was a social center for the
undergraduates who came freely in and out to attend her teas or her
husband's famed "readings aloud" in the vast cellar rumpus room. It
had not taken any of these young men long to cultivate the
acquaintance of the tall lissome blond daughter of the master, with
her infectiously sympathetic laugh, her large, amused yet
tantalizingly detached gray-blue eyes, her high spirits and her bold
graceful stride.
She had certainly not had her looks from her mother. Not that
Violet lacked attractions. She was generally considered the brightest
and wittiest of the college masters' wives (not that this, as she too
often reminded herself, was such a compliment), but such qualities in
a woman were not those that appealed most to young men. Violet had
been pretty enough as a girl, but at fifty her long thin face had
sharpened; her chin was more pointed, her nose more aquiline, and her
pale, rather staring eyes and way of twisting her head around to look
at you while her small body remained absolutely still might suggest a
bird, though a bird of sharp acuity and critical acumen. Some of the
faculty wives professed to be afraid of her tongue, and she didn't
mind this a bit. She would have adored to preside over a salon, and
would have paid with her eyesight for Madame du Deffand's famous one.
And what did she have instead? A circle of Yale students for tea and
an occasional faculty supper where the men argued tediously about
tenure.
And she didn't even get the right undergraduates at tea!
The "prep school" crowd, the sons of her girlhood friends, the scions
of old New York and New England first families - these not only
shunned such sissy affairs as teas; they didn't even apply to
Pierpont, but to Pierson or Davenport or Berkeley. Poor Pierpont, in
the inexplicably arbitrary way of fashion, or perhaps because of one
year's assignment to it of some particularly unattractive and riotous
youths, had acquired the odious name of a "meatball" college. Irving
was sufficiently known as an English professor to attract some of
the "white shoe" crowd to his readings in the cellar - and Irving,
for all his booming enthusiasm for the down-to-earth Chaucer and the
yearning democracy of Walt Whitman, had a distinct preference for
handsome, well-heeled men who belonged to the better fraternities and
senior societies - while she had to hand out her cups and cakes to
hungry bursary students, to timid rustics who regarded her teas as
elegant social rituals and to epicene youths who sought a female
oasis in a rather too boisterously male society.
Of her two children, only Clara had seemed moldable - at
least up to the present crisis. Clara, almost from the beginning, had
been the star of the little family; in Clara, and in Clara alone, had
been Violet's hope of a new and brighter life. Brian, hunky and moody
and truculently independent, already a junior at Yale, was absorbed
in physics and had no interest in the drama of personalities that so
occupied his mother. He would go his own way, God bless him, and
never need her. But Clara could have the world - or could have had
it - if she could only learn to want it enough! She had warmth and
charm and brains and humor, and the way she wrinkled her small,
upturned nose as she smiled or laughed and widened her eyes in
delight was captivating to the coldest male. She was so enchanting
that it sometimes seemed to Violet that she might be playing a part,
like an actress in repertory who could be Imogen one night, Cleopatra
the next, and, yes, even Lady Macbeth on a third.
Violet, over her husband's opposition - and she never
hesitated to overrule him, sharply and effectively, in the very few
matters about which she cared - had sent Clara for three years to
Saint Timothy's, an exclusive girls' boarding school, to get her away
from New Haven and to introduce her to the kind of women Violet
thought would be helpful to her later in life, and the result had
been very satisfactory. Clara had not only led the school
academically; she had excelled in sports, and the leadership that she
had easily established among her classmates showed that she would
never be one of those foolhardy women who neglect to make firm allies
in their own sex. From Saint Timothy's she had gone to Vassar, and at
Vassar she had developed the unfortunate habit of coming home every
weekend. Why? It was surely not for the pleasure of seeing her
parents, or even her brother, of whom she was very fond. No, it could
be for only one reason, and that would surely be the wrong one.
And, of course, it was Bobbie Lester. He was just the kind of
young man Violet had most dreaded because he was the hardest to
fault. He was Irving's principal assistant, a senior working his way
through Yale as a faculty helper, not exactly one of the social crowd
but "connected," as the saying is, his family being respectably
impoverished, with an heroic father killed in France in 1918 and a
brave little mother who gave bridge lessons to her stylish but
charitable friends. Bobbie was handsome and athletic and cheerful and
idealistic; his golden ambition was to return to the prep school he
had so extravagantly loved, and where he had been football captain
and senior prefect, and teach history and coach crew and train boys
for the great adventure of life.
When a beaming Clara and Bobbie came into the garden, hand in
hand, that Sunday afternoon, where Violet was sitting, with the great
hulk of Irving radiating his blessings behind them, to tell her that
they were now really engaged, and wanted to be married in June
because Bobbie had been promised the desired job at his beloved prep
school upon his graduation, Violet found that she simply could not
speak. She got up, hurried into the house and locked herself in her
bedroom. Nor would she open it when Clara pounded on the door and
Irving thundered through the keyhole. She stayed there until she knew
it was time for Clara to return to Vassar and watched her from the
window as Bobbie drove her to her train. Then she emerged to face her
husband.
"There's no point discussing something about which you all
have made up your minds."
And she maintained her position until the following weekend
when Clara returned. She arrived early on Saturday morning and went
to her mother's chamber, where Violet was still in bed, drinking
coffee and working on a crossword puzzle. She sat firmly down in the
chair beside her.
"Mother, you must talk to me!"
Violet filled in a word before looking up. "You're at liberty
to wreck your own life, my dear. But don't ask me to be your
auxiliary. I'll have nothing to do with it!"
"But if I beg you to discuss it with me!"
Violet put down the paper. "In that case, of course, I will.
I've been waiting for the moment when I thought you might be ready to
listen. Really to listen, I mean. There's no point discussing an
engagement with a person determined that nothing will convince her
that her love is not the be-all and end-all of her life."
"And you think that my wanting to talk to you may mean that
I'm having my doubts about that?"
"I don't really think anything, darling, except that you and
I might just possibly be on the verge of a mutual communication."
Clara jumped up from her chair at this and strode to the
window. How her every move was graceful! Violet knew that her
daughter, no matter how keenly her emotions were aroused, never lost
sight of how she appeared to observing eyes.
"It's only because your deafening silence has driven me mad!"
Clara exclaimed, turning now to glare at the complacent maternal
figure in the bed. "As I'm sure you meant it to!"
Violet glanced down at her discarded puzzle. "We don't have
to talk at all, my dear."
"Oh, you know we do! Please, Mummie, let's get on with it.
Tell me why you hate Bobbie."
"I don't hate him at all. I rather like him. As a matter of
fact, if I were ten or fifteen years younger and your father not in
the picture, I could fancy him as a kind of cavaliere servente. For a
time, anyway."
"For a time! That's it, then. You don't think that as a
lover - for that's what your flossy term means, I suppose - that he'd
last?"
"Yes, dear. That is it. In the proverbial nutshell. I don't
think he'd last. And I don't think he will last. For you, I mean."
"You mean you don't think he'd be faithful?"
"You know I don't mean that. He'll be faithful, all right. To
the very end. To the bitter end. And it will be bitter, too, because
he'll be too nice, too dear, too much of a sweet teddy bear, for you
ever to shed. That's where he'll have you, my girl. And for life."
"Why should I ever want to shed him?"
"To save yourself from suffocation. Look, Clara. You've
fallen in love with a pair of shining black eyes, a muscular torso
with broad shoulders and sculpted thighs, an infectious enthusiasm
and some highfalutin ideas - the whole glittering costume of youth -
and all of it directed at you with a passionate sincerity!"
"It is sincere, then? You admit that?"
"Oh, totally. That's the trap that's set for us poor females.
Not that we don't have our own, but that's not what I'm talking about
now. The male animal only wants one thing, and he's off after he's
got it. But the male human wants us for life. You'll find yourself
snared in that school. He'll do well enough there, for the boys will
like him, and the masters won't fear his competition."
"Why won't they?"
"Because they'll see he hasn't got the imagination or drive
or even the backbiting ability ever to be a headmaster, unless he
runs into a Mr. Chips situation, which isn't likely. And as he grows
older, he will become a kind of school legend, much loved but a bit
laughed at by the older and more sophisticated boys who will joke
among themselves at his little clichés."
"Mother, stop! You're too awful!"
"You mean too true. Has Bobbie ever said anything that would
impress you from the lips of a homely man? You know he hasn't, though
you hate to face it. But face it you will when the hair begins to
recede from his temples, and his fanny begins to widen, and he starts
to repeat himself, or rather when you start to notice it. That's a
little process called life, and there's nothing on earth you can do
about it."
"But even if what you say is true or, let us say, has a
molecule of truth in it, which I'm not for a minute conceding,
there'd be things I could do with myself at the school. I wouldn't
have to be submerged in Bobbie's teaching life!"
"Oh, yes, I suppose you could help in local charities. Or
even tutor some of the backward boys. Or take up watercolors. And, of
course, it would be an ideal life for a writer, if you had any gift
in that line. But I don't see that as your cup of tea. And the
atmosphere of a school community can be a terrible anaesthetic."
"I'd have children, I hope. And the support of a loving
husband."
"The last you'd certainly have. And I'm sure Bobbie would be
a vigorous lover. But you'd pay a high price for those wild nights,
my girl. And at the risk of your calling me an old bawd, I'd like to
point out that Bobbie is far from being the only male who could give
them to you."
"Really, Mother, I wouldn't have thought it of you!"
"You think women my age don't have their fantasies about sex?
Dream on, my dear!"
Violet had sown her seed; she knew when to stop. When Bobbie
came to lunch that day, she was very cordial, particularly as he
played into her hand with his theory of how to redirect the
disciplinary emphasis of the school to which he was headed.
"I believe there has been too much of the negative in the
moral code of the preparatory schools," he opined gravely. "Too many
can'ts and don'ts. One headmaster is even reputed to have said that
if his vocabulary were limited to a single word and that word
was 'no,' he could still get by. I think boys are better than that.
After all, they are young men. I think if you challenge them with
something positive, put before them a 'do' or a 'let's go' instead of
a bleak prohibition, you have a good chance of lighting the real fire
inside them. It's the difference between offense and defense, between
the guy with the puck before his stick and the goalie. Give the boys
something really to go for . . ."
She didn't have to look at Clara. She knew that she was
wincing.
Violet was very well aware that she was engaged in a struggle
that she might lose, but that didn't matter to her. She wanted to be
sure that she had done all she could to keep her daughter from making
her mistake, or rather from making a much graver one. For Bobbie
Lester was never going to have a career that approached the success
of Irving Longcope's. Indeed, most of Violet's friends and relatives
considered that she had done very well for herself. Irving was a
college master and a popular teacher; he cut a sufficient figure on
the Yale campus. That was all very well, and Violet was not a woman
to undervalue her few blessings as she took them out, one by one,
from the tight little chest of her memories and reappraisals, counted
them and put them carefully back. It was all very well, truly, but
Irving Longcope had not become half the man she had expected him to
be.
Her family, the Edeys, had been the kind of old New Yorkers
who had been somehow able to subsist, with moderate but unquestioned
respectability, for generations on the fringe of Knickerbocker
society, supported by the exiguous rentals of some tightly retained
strips of lower Manhattan real estate. Her father had attained an
obscure fame by writing a popular book of opera plots with
photographs of the great divas of the golden age - Calvé, Eames,
Ternina - and some moderately witty vers de société. He had been a
fussy old dandy, a perennially white-tied figure seated in the back
of the boxes of the parterre, in one of which he actually managed to
die. His wife was the constantly ailing malade imaginaire of the era,
mild, sweet and uncomplaining, who didn't mind that her spouse was so
often asked to dine out en garçon. Violet had been sent to Miss
Chapin's School; she had grown up with all the "right" people; in
fact she had grown up with none others. But she had always known that
her family lived on the edge, that the morning mail contained bills
that her father would crumple with a grunt of outrage and that, as a
debutante, she had come out only on the ...