A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (2 page)

Mother was too intelligent for prejudice but too indifferent to fight it. A friend of my father's attending a reception at the Stantons as a young man told me that he once found my mother, Priscilla, then eighteen, pouting in a corner at some sort of gathering. She complained: "Mother asks all her pet Jews, but won't have mine."

Mother's prejudices were non-denominational. What she complained about in me was my admiration of wealth. "My grandmother's snobbishness has come back to earth in Louis," she used to say.

Her grandmother, born Babcock, had been a rigid, bewigged old dowager with the rough candor about money of an earlier New York society. "Don't say you don't like Mrs. Kings-land," she once reproached my mother. "She has three million dollars."

The elderly lady was not much impressed by Mother's engagement to an Auchincloss. "I suppose it's better than being the last leaf on the tree" was her comment. She thought of Mother at twenty-one as an old maid! She herself had been married at sixteen.

Despite the fact that there were few with whom she could discuss his depression, Mother gave my father unfailing and needed support. She had no ambition for the glories of the world, but she possessed a strong desire to hang on to the benefits of her family's share of the status quo for her children. She had great faith in the economic opportunities available to her sons if they followed the normal course of their class and fortune. She dreaded their striking out into untested areas.

In all of this she was an average mother; the trouble was that she was not an average woman. She was brilliantly imaginative, well read, and independently daring;
she
should have been the writer in the family. As it was she gave too much of her fine mind to the care of her offspring at the expense of their independence.

But where these children were concerned she was abjectly timid; she deemed it her sacred duty to spare them all risks, emotional and physical. Her fine mind was singularly free of prejudice, but she saw danger to her dependents in the unconventional. And she saw it in any overemphasis on the arts, which she could not justify except in the case of near genius, which she certainly did not recognize in my literary aspirations, with the result that she used all her formidable talents to discourage my writing. She quite sincerely believed she was sparing me the bitterness of failure. But there was in her also a curious pessimism about the ability of her children to achieve success in any field. If one of us fell in love, for example, she tended to assume it would be unrequited.

M
Y BROTHER JOHN,
six years my senior, was a sober, serious man with a fine clear mind who interrupted a promising career in the State Department to share a life of pleasure and leisure with a rich and devoted wife. Armed with discrimination, taste, and moderation, they achieved both happiness and success in the sort of existence that often offers less than that.

John was a brilliant student at school and college, but he was totally devoid of personal ambition and made not the slightest change in his natural good manners in greeting no matter how famous a visitor. When our cousin Janet Auchincloss (Mrs. Hugh D.), whose daughter Jackie would become first lady, beckoned to him at a crowded Washington party to come and talk to her, he simply shook his head. Asked later to explain this, he told her:

"But Janet, to get near you I have to elbow my rough way through a gaping crowd. I don't do that."

"
Look whom you leave me with.
"

Janet was right. The great are left with the wrong people.

***

Once, when I pointed out to my older brother that I found his group in Newport on the stuffy side, he replied that their dinners were good and their guests on time and never inebriated. I retorted that he would have been happy with the formality and regularity of the court of Versailles, and he did not deny it. For a long time it seemed to me that this propriety was inconsistent with a serious life, that such an attitude must indicate a certain triviality of spirit or even of heart. I was wrong.

My brother, you see, needed only himself for an intellectual companion. He was a deep reader and thinker, and a conscientious liberal in a rigidly conservative society to whose tenets he paid no attention but never took the trouble to contradict. When he had to face a long and agonizing death struggle, no one was ever a better or more cheerful patient, making as little fuss as possible for those looking after him and never complaining. "I can do less and less things," he told me once, "but the lucky thing is that I still enjoy those things."

No less worthy of respect, my uncle Bill, as a Japanese prisoner after the fall of Hong Kong, did all that could be done for his fellows who appointed him as their liaison with the guards and other captors. He and his wife were generally credited with having done everything possible to alleviate the general misery.

I thought of these two men one weekend when my wife, Adele, and I were visiting her grandmother on Long Island, and I happened to overhear a conversation between her uncle, Douglas Burden, and his elderly mother, Adele Sloane Burden, who was, at the time, more often referred to as Mrs. Richard Tobin. During the talk, Douglas urged her to persuade his brother Jimmy not to play golf at the Piping Rock Club on the north shore of Long Island. Jimmy's game, it seems, was a disgrace to the family, at least as far as Douglas was concerned. Neither his mother nor my uncle would have gone along with this; they were much too kind to have hurt anyone's feelings for such a reason, but they would have sympathized with Douglas's distaste for any public display of athletic incompetence.

For a time it seemed my sister Priscilla might be deprived of many of life's great satisfactions. This shy and affectionate girl suffered from an even worse case of the depressive condition that plagued my father.

She and I had adjoining bedrooms on the fourth floor front of the family brownstone on Ninety-first Street. She, being my elder by almost two years, of course occupied the larger room with two windows on the street while I was relegated to the much smaller which had only one. I resented this. The bathroom in the middle of the fourth floor we shared, and I was disgusted at the time she took in it behind a door she always primly locked.

I was then enrolled at Bovee and she in Miss Chapin's, a few blocks south. Maggie, our nurse, would pick me up at noon and walk me down to Miss Chapin's to get Priscilla. My poor sister, at twelve, was undergoing the severe mental stress of a constant bad conscience over trivial matters. This was all part of her condition.

Such things were never discussed in those days. People were too apt to jump to conclusions that far exceeded the actual condition. When the doctors treating my father sought to trace the origin of his disease in his family, I kept my sharp little ears open and picked up the legend that, as a Newport debutante, grandmother Auchincloss had tried to drown herself (a tale barely creditable and utterly hushed up) and that a crazy niece of hers had actually murdered a woman friend.

Although I concealed my finds from the outside world, I was enchanted by such accounts, which made a dull family exciting. Despite the stern parental warnings, I told all my little friends that the doctors were probably going to put my sister in a straightjacket. My poor bewildered parents couldn't imagine where these rumors were coming from.

My unhappy sister would awake me at night with complaints like: "We were playing tag in the yard at recess today, and I touched a girl on the shoulder and cried 'You're it!' But did I actually touch her? Might I have cheated?"

You can imagine how much consolation she got from a kid brother angry at being awakened. Besides, I was already convinced that she got too much sympathy from our parents, whose growing alarm over her condition was, of course, not understandable to me. A crisis arose one Christmas when she refused to open a single present marked "For Priscilla," insisting that it might be for Mother, whose namesake she was.

My sister had a series of female paid companions who were disguised professionals trained to cheer her up and help her to find life interesting. They became, of course, a feature of family life not wholly welcome. I recall one who tried to stimulate conversation at breakfast by asking my father, a devoted Wagnerian, if he did not find the music of
Tristan
vulgar and sensuous. Another one, a rather pretty Miss Jack, was engaged to a man called Bill, and I used to infuriate her by singing excerpts from the song "My Bill," which Helen Morgan had then made famous in
Show Boat:
"He's just my Bill, an ordinary man; you'd meet him on the street and never notice him." Finally she actually gave notice, and Mother thought it was so silly she never scolded me.

The companion who was with us longest, a Miss Warfield, was an amiable, well-meaning, but thickly sentimental woman who was rumored in later years to have been some kin to the duchess of Windsor whom she certainly did not resemble. It was her enthusiastic theory that Priscilla be introduced to "Mother Nature" by spending a night outside in the woods in Maine. Great preparations were made under Miss Warfield's detailed instructions. Sheets, blankets, pillows, pots and pans, breakfast foods, insect deterrents, medicines, flashlights, and Lord knows what else were hauled by our reluctant chauffeur into the woods adjoining our property, and something like a camp was set up.

In the morning after a sleepless night the chauffeur and Maggie brought the adventurers back to the house, where they gratefully spent the day in bed.

Expert and expensive psychiatric treatment in those days was centered in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Priscilla was placed in the care of a famous and fashionable doctor there.
His treatment would, I am sure, be considered odd today. He opined that Priscilla's trouble originated in a family with three boys and she must be reintegrated in one with two girls and a doctor. Guess which doctor and guess his fee! Twenty thousand dollars a year, in the 1930s! But Mother believed in doctors and even in their fees. The money was paid and Priscilla moved to Stockb ridge for a year or more. When she came home, she was just the same so far as I could see, but always in the company of a disguised trained nurse.

Mother, however, was by no means always to be put upon. She and I were once in Grand Central Station waiting for a train to take us to Stockbridge to spend a weekend with Priscilla, when whom should we see but our famous doctor, who had just detrained?

"Oh, Mrs. Auchincloss, I'm glad to run into you. I've had an emergency call and can't be with you this weekend as planned. But you'll find everything ready for you."

To my amazement I heard Mother's firm reply. "No, Doctor, that won't do. I'm afraid you'll have to take the train back to Stockbridge with me."

And he did! She was supporting him.

Mother did not hesitate to draft the family into her different projects for Priscilla. The family came first, and if one was ailing the others had to defer. Thus when Priscilla, behind as usual in her schoolwork, needed summer tutoring and Mother feared the effect on her of strange teachers, she induced my older brother to give up a trip to Europe to do the job.

John was something of a saint, always obliging her, but I was different. When Mother asked me to have Priscilla as my guest at the annual school dance at Groton, I flatly refused. Whereas John, at party after party, refrained from dancing that he might be free to rescue Priscilla when she was "stuck" too long with some frustrated youth.

She was not insensitive nor, by nature, ungrateful, but she never quite realized how much John did for her in these early days. People, even well brought up and thoughtful young women, are rarely inclined to acknowledge those who cover their disadvantages. Priscilla went her own way until the night (I shall never forget it!) when, one might say, she woke up. Her relief from illness must have been gradually arriving, but it was at a club dance where we spotted her, suddenly moving animatedly over the floor with a handsome young man I had never seen before. Both were smiling. I asked John if he had introduced them, and he said no, the man had just cut in. Although I have no intention of trivializing her condition or minimizing the difficulties of alleviating it, it seemed that Priscilla had, that very night, suddenly decided that life might be different. From then on she got better and better, and acquired all the friends she needed. She married happily and had three fine children. There were always to be bad times-severe recurrent depressions—but there were good ones as well.

I have not mentioned my brother Howland as he is still living and can still speak of his experience for himself. I honor him with silence, as I have tried to recapture our siblings, their struggles and kindnesses, with understanding and fairness.

We were united all of us in our family, but rarely deeply intimate. In the times of which I speak it seems there was more not discussed than otherwise. What was there, after all, to share at length, even among family? Loyalty and consideration—this is how it was among brothers and sisters in the world from which we came: society, as it was known, mostly by those who found themselves admiring its surfaces from the outskirts. Those of us on the inside, feeling the expectations and demands, may have felt somewhat differently. At least on occasion.

T
HERE IS NO
such thing as a predominating and generally recognized Society in New York City today, but there are, indeed, many societies. The so-called Social Register has swollen to the size of a fat telephone directory, and it is just as common for people to refuse to be listed as to seek to get in. The announcement of engagements and marriages in the Sunday
New York Times
lists dozens of couples. In my youth, the social page of the daily
Times
devoted its left-hand column to a single pair with a large portrait of the bride or fiancée who were apt to be known, or at least known of, by a good portion of the readers.

In the 1920s and '30s there existed indubitably, however hard to define, a social structure called "society" that regarded itself as just that. These persons resided on the East Side of Manhattan (never west except below Fifty-ninth Street) as far south as Union Square and as far north as Ninety-sixth Street. The members (if that is the word; it doesn't seem quite right) were largely Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin. (Note that Catholics and nonpracticing Jews were not always excluded if rich enough.) The men were apt to be in business, finance, or law, sometimes in medicine, rarely in the church and almost never in politics. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception and not a popular one, either.