Manhattan Monologues: Stories - 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.

All That May Become a Man

I have never dropped the junior from my name, Ambrose Vollard, even
after my father"s death, because I always felt that the important
thing about me was that I was his son. It was not that he was a
distinguished historical figure—he wasn"t. He lived the life, as my
mother once put it, of a "charming idler," the adequately endowed New
York gentleman of Knickerbocker forebears who had dedicated his
existence to sport and adventure. But he was also a hero— that was
the real point — to his non-heroic only son. As a Rough Rider he had
charged up San Juan Hill after his beloved leader, the future
President; he had slaughtered dozens of the most dangerous beasts of
the globe; and he had attended expeditions to freezing and tropical
uncharted lands for museums and zoos.
As a child I was obsessed with the notion that youth was only
a preparation for the rigors of manhood. I was fourteen when the
battleship Maine was blown up in the harbor of Havana, and I could
never forget the noisy reaction of Father and his two brothers at the
family board in Washington Square or their enthusiastic welcome of
the prospect of war. They actually hoped to see New York under fire
from the Spanish fleet, and America awakened from its slothful torpor
and materialism by the clarion call to arms! The Vollard brothers
were all tall bony men, with fine knobbly aristocratic features, who
spoke in decibels higher than anyone else"s, dominating every
conversation with their loud mocking laughs, never guilty of
any "business" but zestfully using the remnants of an old real estate
fortune in pursuit of the fox, the grizzly bear or the lion, while
not neglecting — for no Philistines they!— the reading of great books
or the viewing of great pictures or even, if they could be silent
long enough, the hearing of great music. I used to think of Father as
a kind of amiable Cesare Borgia. I looked at him with an awe
sandwiched between two dreads: the dread of never being able to
emulate him and the dread of his finding this out.
Colonel Roosevelt, as he was always referred to in the
family, even after he had received higher titles, was Father"s god as
well as friend. This great man, for all his multiple interests, had
time in his life for men like the Vollards, whose zeal and courage
and love of violent action made up, to his mind anyway, for their
social inutility. I was introduced early, not only to the Colonel but
to his books, and was indoctrinated in the creed that bravery was the
sovereign virtue in a man, that a "splendid little war" like the
Spanish one had been a blessing in disguise to preserve our national
virility and that a coward was not a man at all.
And women? What of them? Well, their role was simpler: to
inspire men and to bear children. Why, I sometimes agonized, in the
deep, dark, deluding safety of the night, had I not been born a
woman? And I knew, I always knew, that the mere presence of this evil
wish, even in the innermost recesses of my mind, damned me forever.
At least with men. Was there any hope of redemption in the eyes of
women? Did Mother suspect what I was going through? I sometimes
wondered.
Leonie Vollard was as small and white and quiet as her
husband was big and brown and noisy, but she was in no way
subservient. Despite their obvious deep devotion to each other, they
nonetheless preserved inviolate their respective and distinctly
separate "spheres of interest." She never protested against his long
absences on hunting and exploratory expeditions, nor did he ever
interfere with her exquisite housekeeping in the lovely red-brick
early Federal house in Washington Square. She sat silently through
the spirited, even raucous arguments of the Vollard clan at her
dinner table, and he was a subdued guest at the readings of her
poetry club. In his den he was allowed any number of animal trophies,
but no claw, hoof, horn or antler was permitted in her chaste blue-
and-yellow parlor. Similarly, the children were divided; my two
younger sisters were left largely to their mother"s care and
supervision, while my guidance and training were Father"s primary
responsibilities. Yet Mother never conveyed any impression that she
was unconcerned with my welfare. Quiet and reserved as she was, she
managed to radiate the feeling that every unit of her family was
equally important to her.
Certainly the thing that confused me most in my relationship
with Father was that he was the most amiable, the most enchanting
parent one could imagine. Of course, that had to be because he had no
conception of what was going on inside me. His patient joviality in
teaching me to ride, to jump, to shoot and to hunt, first the
pheasant and then the fox, on our Long Island estate was never marred
by reprehension of my ineptitudes, but loudly expressed by applause
at my every successful effort. And in due time I learned to conduct
myself with some competence in riding and shooting, aided by my
earnest desire to accomplish the seemingly hopeless task of becoming
the youth Father cheerfully insisted on believing I was. To follow
his graceful figure across the fields after the hounds was indeed a
pleasure, but I never lost sight of what to me were the inevitable
future tests of manhood that I believed awaited me as the real
justification for my training: that war where I would have to fight
an enemy, perhaps hand to hand, in mud and horror, or the African
safari where I would be obliged to stand rigid before a charging
rhino.
At Saint Jude"s, the boys" boarding school in Massachusetts
to which I was sent, I was slightly more relaxed, relieved as I was,
except on parents" weekends, of Father"s pushing-me-on presence,
although the academy heartily endorsed his athletic enthusiasms,
including football, a game I particularly detested. Father went so
far as to say that he would be ashamed of any son or nephew who
didn"t go in for the game. I was tall for my age but slender, and I
got knocked about on the field quite painfully, yet I survived, and
not too discreditably. Father, who came up to school frequently to
view the Saturday afternoon games, was aware of my difficulty and did
his best to reassure me. Walking back to the gymnasium after a match,
he put an arm around my shoulders and said: "You mustn"t mind, dear
boy, if you don"t make the school varsity team. A man can do just so
much with the physique God has given him, and you"ve done everything
that could be expected of a boy with your muscular equipment. I am
very proud of you. In a couple of years you may become heftier, but
it doesn"t matter, because you"ll always do the best with what you"ve
got, and that"s all that can be expected of any man."
Oh, yes, he made allowances; he always did for me. He was
determined to squeeze me somehow into his male heaven. But in the
fall of my next-to-last year at the school I came close, for the
first time in my life, to something faintly resembling an outer
protest against Saint Jude"s echo of Father"s principles. This new
little spurt of defiance was no doubt fostered by Father"s absence,
not only from the school but the country on an extended expedition to
the Antarctic.
I began, at first surreptitiously, to skip the near
compulsory attendance at the Saturday afternoon football matches
between Saint Jude"s and visiting teams. This was considered a
serious breach of the required "school spirit," and when it became
known that I had been caught in the library during our match with
Chelton, the supreme athletic contest of the school year, I was
shocked to find myself condemned to the humiliation of being "pumped."
This grave punishment of a graver offense consisted of being
ordered to stand up before the whole school at roll call to be
berated by the senior monitor (no faculty being present, as if to
emphasize the hors la loi aspect of the proceeding) and then to be
hustled by six sturdy members of the senior class down to the cellar
to be half-drowned in the laundry wash basin.
The actual experience was soon over, but the shame was
supposed to be deep and lasting. Yet I was oddly unmindful of the
social ostracism that followed the event. It was something of a
relief to be known at last for the poor thing I was. My only real
concern was what Father would think. Would he even hear of it? I
madly hoped not.
Of course he did, and from the headmaster himself in a
special report to my parents. Home from the South Pole, he came right
up to the school and took me for a Sunday afternoon walk through the
woods to the river. It was a gloomy day, cold and cloudy, and I felt
as bare as the stripped November trees. But the pain and concern on
poor Father"s face and the gentleness of his tone took me at last out
of myself, and my mind turned over feverishly, seeking a way to spare
his feelings.
"But what was your point, dear boy, in absenting yourself
from the games? Was it to have more time to study?"
"Oh, no."
"Was it possibly to be alone to do something that was
prohibited? Like smoking or drinking? You needn"t be afraid that your
old father will give you away. I"m just trying to understand; that"s
all."
And then I had it! It was a desperate try, but it was all I
had. "I wanted to test my courage! I wanted to see if I could stand
up to the worst thing that could happen to me in school! I wanted to
be pumped!"
Of course, this was a bare-faced lie. I had had no notion
that I would be caught or, if caught, that I would be so severely
punished. But Father"s face, though bewildered, was clearing, and I
hurried on. "Boys my age haven"t had the chance to prove themselves
the way you did in the Spanish war! I wanted to see how I would stand
up in a crisis. And I did! I did!"
Father had tears in his eyes as he turned to hug me. "Oh, my
dear fellow, you went much too far! I"m afraid I"ve done too much
bragging about my own tiny feats. What have I ever done but kill a
few animals?"
"And men," I added stoutly.
"Well, we have to do that in war, regrettably. But, dear son,
you must learn to moderate yourself. You have to live in this world,
and that involves a certain amount of compromise. Not of your honor,
of course, but in small social matters such as attending popular
events, even if they bore you. One mustn"t let oneself get too
prickly. And as for courage, dear boy, you have as much of it as any
proud father could wish!"
My next real nervous crisis was delayed by four years. After
my sophomore year at Harvard, Father took me along on what I had
always regarded as the inevitable test—a hunting safari in Kenya.
Mother and my sisters, of course, were left behind in the enviable
security of New York; it was only I who had to be exposed to what
Father gleefully assured me would be the thrill of my lifetime.
We set forth into the veldt with one of my uncles and a
couple of enthusiastic young male cousins, a white hunter and some
thirty bearers (the Vollard men always did things poshly). I had,
reluctantly, to admit that I liked the countryside. It rolled away
romantically and awesomely to the horizon on all sides, and had it
been stripped of animal and insect life, I could have imagined
enjoying myself. But of course it fairly teemed with both, and my
relatives were intent on seeking the largest and most dangerous of
the fauna. They soon found them.
The days were bad enough, with a charging elephant or Cape
buffalo or lion brought down by Vollard fire two or three times a
week, but the nights were worse. Our white hunter assured me that the
great beasts that wandered through our camp at night would never
break into a tent, but how could I be sure of that? Why would the
mate of an elephant slaughtered in daylight not take revenge on its
helpless murderers in the dark? I would toss on my cot for hours
until sheer exhaustion robbed me of consciousness. And the huge bugs!
Ugh!
Father noticed that I was tired, and sometimes he mercifully
left me in camp to rest while the others were out shooting. But even
then I would be nervous, left alone with a few unarmed bearers while
animals prowled around and the guns were away. When I went out with
them, Father usually kept me at his side, and he was noisily
congratulatory when I shot and killed an oryx and then an eland.
Neither of the poor beasts had tried to do anything but get away from
us. And we were blessedly approaching the end of our terrible safari
when the moment that I had dreaded burst upon me. Our hunter had
spotted a huge old tuskless—and hence dangerously malevolent —bull
elephant, exiled from the herd and surly, and Father suggested that
he and I should, without the others, have the glory of bringing it
down.
As we cautiously approached the monster, it picked up our
scent and turned to us, raising its trunk formidably and flapping its
great ears. Even Father seemed to have a second thought.
"Ambrose, quick! Run back to the others; I can handle this."
And I would have done so! I would! But I was literally
paralyzed with panic. My legs were two stone pillars; I couldn"t even
raise my rifle. The bull was charging now, a thundering black cloud
of terror, and I knew my end had come.
I heard the crack of Father"s gun, and the huge beast went
down, a rolling mass of agony, then suddenly still.
"By God, you"re a cool one!" Father cried. "You stood there
without blinking. And you were a gentleman, too. You let me have the
first go at him when there mightn"t have been a second!"
"Oh, I knew you"d bring him down," I heard myself say.
That night I was struck with a fever, which nobody attributed
to my trauma, and I was sent back to the base camp. By the time I had
recuperated, the safari was over.

The next decade brought great changes and something like peace to my
life. In the first place, Father lost the greater part of his by then
diminished fortune when the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its
doors in the panic of 1907. There was no longer the possibility of my
leading the economically carefree life that he and his brothers had
enjoyed; it was now incumbent upon me to earn my own living, which
fortunately I was not only happy but relieved to do. After Harvard
College, I attended Harvard Law and then secured a good position as a
clerk in a leading Wall Street firm.
Father was constantly apologetic that his poor management had
condemned me to what he downrated as the passive life of a desk grub.
But to me it was the pleasant calm of a dull gray restful heaven
after the flickering red of adventure. I believed that my fears and
anticipations were over, that I had been tested, after all, and not
found wanting as a man, and that I could now look forward, like
millions of other males, to the routine of a mild usefulness. To cap
it all, I married a girl who had the same ambition—or lack of it, as
the Vollards undoubtedly would have put it.
Ellen, the child of Long Island neighbors whom I had known
and liked since childhood, had always been a quiet little girl, sober
and serious, who from her earliest days had known exactly what she
wanted from life: a f...