A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (5 page)

They were not at all a bad faculty; with decent management they could have contributed to what certainly could have been an effective school. The Latin teacher, Mr. Van Wormer, a huge stentorian man, conveyed some of the authority of ancient Rome, and Mr. Sedgwick, small and precise, appeared a fitting teacher of mathematics. The school seems to have limited them in terms of disciplinary tactics to hair pulling: Van Wormer would grab a handful and shake a boy; Sedgwick would take a strand and twist it painfully.

French was the department of two elderly Gallic maiden sisters, one a timid white-haired creature known simply as Mademoiselle and the other, bony and dominating, who was called the real Mademoiselle. She would stand at the head of her stairway in the midst of the morning rush crying
Doucement!
which the boys mocked as "Do some more."

It was the custom to give the teachers something at Christmas, a tradition of which Mother heartily disapproved. I could only get stockings from her for the women educators. These less than luxurious presents were quite obviously scorned by the real Mademoiselle who, after the slenderest of acknowledgments, held up before the class an envelope given her by a luckier boy crying: "I can feel it contains a five-dollar gold piece like last year." When I told Mother this I couldn't even get stockings out of her the next year.

The poor mademoiselles, when out of work like the others, tried to start a dress shop with a rather limited selection of only eight dresses. My parents, of course, were not unaware of the school's decline, and wanted to transfer me to St. Bernard's, despite the colorful picture in its front hall of Lucrezia Borgia presiding over a conclave of the college of cardinals during the pontificate of her father, Alexander VI. But I liked Bovee and its lax discipline and my few silly friends there. Life was not taken too seriously, even where sports were concerned. This, I realized, was remarkable in a world over-stimulated by athleticism, not to mention competition.

I recall a new boy who affected the "mucker pose" arriving in time for baseball in the park and asking, "Where's de coach?" Someone pointed to a Fifth Avenue bus rumbling by. "Dere's de coach."

Tommy Curtis, my particular pal, was almost a reason in himself to take a boy out of Bovee. Though in my class and presumably more or less the same age, he was three years my senior. Furthermore, he affected a high sophistication and was always talking about Broadway musicals named
Gay Paree
or
The Countess Maritza.
In later life he lived in Paris, reviewed movies, and wrote a biography of Erich von Stroheim. One summer he penned a letter urging me to read the current bestseller
The Well of Loneliness,
an early novel about lesbianism. Mother, who never hesitated to open her children's mail, handed me this epistle as if with tongs, saying, "I don't like your friend Curtis." She must have not read
The Well of Loneliness,
or the letter would not have been given to me at all. I was eleven!

Tommy added to his sins in Mother's eye by living on the despised West side and being sent to school by his widowed mother in the aforementioned red Rolls-Royce limousine. I remember being mystified when I overheard Mother asking Father, "Do you suppose there ever
was
a Mister Curtis?"

Anyway, despite my correspondents and their seemingly controversial subjects, my parents let me remain at Bovee. I had only another year there before being sent to Groton, where my status as a graduate's son meant automatic admission, whatever school I had been to before. But I have sometimes wondered if I was sent to the Knickerbocker Greys as a sort of disinfectant following the contamination infected by Tommy Curtis and other Bovee miscreants.

The Greys were a military institution run in the Park Avenue armory and designed for boys largely taken from nearby private day schools. Two afternoons a week we were marched to the armory for training in close order drills and the handling of fake firearms. Uniforms were provided; mock battles planned; and the officers, much envied, wore plumes in their caps. My Fowler first cousins were among the latter, but I remained a humble private during my entire year there. I didn't, however, mind the place after I had finally persuaded Mother that it didn't become a soldier to be accompanied to the Greys by a nursemaid.

My enrollment was supposedly voluntary, but it actually stemmed from a remark of mine taken by my parents as cute. Asked if I would like to go to the Greys, I replied that I should certainly be prepared in the event of another war. I was too young to remember the First World War, though I was actually a baby in an army camp in Kentucky when it ended. Father was in an officers' training camp at the time, and Mother, with three children at that point and four maids, had joined him there. Mocked for this number of domestics in later years, she simply said: "Martha Whitney had taken eight."

The armistice saved Father from the trenches, but two uncles and innumerable cousins had gone, and the talk I heard of the conflict engraved early on in my mind the apprehension that enlistment might be the direful and unavoidable fate of every generation. But the Greys nonetheless struck me as a harmless and even amusing facsimile of world carnage. Once I got the hang of it, it was rather fun to march in unison about that gigantic hall to the shouts "Squad right!" or "Right by squadrons!" or "Squad left!" or "Left by squadrons!" In mock battle, where one was instructed to indicate that one was a casualty simply by lying down, I thought I should add a touch of drama by clutching my heart and reeling to the floor.

This was followed by the reproof of a plumed cousin. Of course it was all play-acting seemingly frivolous when considered against the dark future of boarding school, which loomed like a black cloud on the immediate horizon. People would tell me, "You're just going to love Groton," but I didn't think they believed it themselves. And why did my older brother never warn me about it? It was, I thought, all part of a conspiracy as to how the world, the real world, was made to seem bearable to those about to enter it.

If the Greys were a kind of benign microcosm of war, dancing school on Thursday afternoons in the ballroom of the Colony Club might be said to have been a similarly junior form of adult entertainment. Older people danced, yes, but certainly none I had seen in my limited travels moved in a fashion anywhere near what we were encouraged to adopt. Perhaps, though this was unlikely, none I knew had suffered under the dictatorship to minuet offered up by Mrs. Hubbell, a stiff, solid, silkily barked oak tree of a woman who was reputed to have instructed the princess royal of Britain in the art of Terpsichore.

Awesome it was for a boy to be selected by that figure of robust carriage to be her partner in the demonstration of a step. Without fail one would be instructed, rather vigorously, to press a hand more firmly on that unslender, thickly corseted back. Could any male have ever clasped it in love? Perhaps not, though in a thunderous gale it might have offered safe and ample harbor. What a man Mr. Hubbell must have been! Never shall I forget how our venerable instructress, determined that her pupils be not behind in the latest craze, slowly and gravely bent her knees to illustrate the dip of the Charleston.

But soon all commotion would end. All such activity was swept away by boarding school and Groton. When the sexes next met, it was in black pumps and formal dresses, in the uneasy shyness of the junior subscription dance, where, as one girl put it, even the ladies' room stank of fear. The battles of society start young.

I
WAS NINE YEARS OLD
when I began a silent but rather dangerous form of what I suppose was rebellion. Or perhaps mere but short-lived insanity. I committed a series of larcenies. I had never stolen before and would, save for this brief interlude, never do so again. It was all quite curious, even to myself. It began with toys. The children of the summer people on Breezy Way in Lawrence, Long Island, with whom I played, had ample toys, and it was a simple matter for me, on occasion, to possess myself surreptitiously of an item coveted. But crime, like vermin, has the tendency toward rapid swelling, and I soon came to desire items of greater significance, including, alas, those belonging to adults. The most valuable of these that I can first recall was a pocket comb in a gold slipcase which I took from the bureau of a family weekend guest. Its loss was not discovered. And the streak continued.

What were my feelings? Not ones of severe guilt, anyway. I knew of course that theft was wrong, even rather importantly wrong. But it didn't have any real existence to my twisted reckoning unless it was discovered; concealed it was nothing. Not the slightest communication could be risked, however, even with Tommy Curtis or Rivington Pyne, my two best and perhaps most similarly adventurous friends at Bovee. The precarious feeling of the adventure was entirely conditional; everything depended on my silence. And then, not long after the epoch-making theft of the comb, I was smitten with a new kind of violent temptation, far stronger than any I had felt for the rather junky items I had so far acquired and carefully hidden away.

Uncle Russell Auchincloss, Father's very dignified and awesome older brother, was spending a weekend with us in Lawrence, and he unwisely showed me a golden gadget on his watch chain from which you could pull a scissors, a nail file, and God knows what else. I was seized with a longing for it. It had to be mine. Going to his bedroom when he was playing tennis with Father, I found the gadget detached from its chain on the bureau, and I took it. Was I mad? How did I ever expect to get away with it? Nor did I. My uncle complained; everyone, maids and all, were questioned. The house was searched. Then came the denouement: Maggie discovered my cache and, of course, despite my pleas betrayed me to my mother.

The silence that followed was beyond chastening. At first, not a word was spoken to me, so I knew that the matter was too grave for immediate retribution. That came on Monday morning, when we were back in town, and my sister, Priscilla, and I were waiting in the front hall for Maggie to take us to school. Father, on his way to work, suddenly appeared, striding down the stairway, and addressed me in a loud stentorian voice that I had not heard before. He announced that if I were ever caught stealing again, I should be whipped. Then he charged out the front door.

I was appalled, but I sensed, even then, that this would never happen because I would never steal again. I didn't believe that Father even possessed a whip; he had never physically chastised me. I had no great sense of guilt or shame; theft was simply something that didn't work and had to be given up forever, and that was that. I don't think I could steal a loaf of bread today if I were starving. But there was a curious aftermath to the scene in the hallway.

It did not come on the part of my father. He never again mentioned this aspect of my life to me, nor did it seem to have made the slightest difference in his attitude toward me. Yet I have always strongly suspected that it had appalled him and that he had deliberately attempted to blot out of his mind the idea that a son of his could be a thief. It was simply not part of the world to which he lovingly aspired, the man's world of sports, clubs, finance. This was the realm of the noisy, numerous, neighboring, highly masculine Auchincloss cousins with whom, from childhood, he had been closely associated.

Later on in life, my father rather unexpectedly told me that, however little I shared what he considered the Auchincloss traits, which I had felt so sorely lacking, I had always been his favorite child. My siblings found him amiable but detached. They did not suspect the lonelier more sensitive side that he tended to hide, but which, perhaps because of my own temperament, I perceived and empathized with. My mother's understanding of this part of my father was what gave this all-loving wife her total power over him. To some extent I shared this with her; he was not ashamed to show me his fragility.

He was born a twin but had lost his twin brother at age two. A psychiatrist who later treated him opined that his emotional problems may have been engendered by his mother's violent grief over the loss of his brother, which might have given the survivor a false sense of guilt, but who knows? Father, through the Howland family, was a third cousin of F.D.R., whom he very faintly resembled. Without his occasional depressions he might have had a more important career as a corporate lawyer, but he did well enough.

The aftermath to the discovery of my theft, to which I have referred, should have come as no surprise to me. Mother asked me, reasonably and even gently, to bring her everything that I had stolen, and I proceeded to comply. But I didn't bring her them all. I feared that the whole list might disturb the air of pardon that was settling over the family. But I nonetheless felt it was my sacred duty to see that every item still withheld was returned, however secretly, to its rightful owner. Only thus could I assure myself that the whole horrid business had returned to the void in which I had originally conceived it.

The toys presented little problem. I simply added them, when unobserved, to the ravaged treasure troves of my young friends. "Oh, there it is," one of them might observe. "I was wondering where it had got to." But I was stuck with two objects: a small silver tray, shaped like a heart, with the initials C.P.D., which I knew stood for Courtland Palmer Dixon, a cousin and neighbor, parental visits to whom rarely included small and noisy boys, and a small child's drinking cup decorated with painted circles, taken from an infrequently patronized notions shop in nearby Cedarhurst, the village of our Long Island retreat. I cannot imagine what drew me to either one, but there they were, seemingly fatal hurdles to my recovered innocence.

I had to wait a long time before I had a chance to go to the Dixons. Mother was quite often a guest there, but when I asked if I might accompany her, the answer was usually "No, there's nothing for you to do there." But at last came the day when she took me along. There were Dixon cousins my age visiting and so I was included. Finally, there was the opportunity for my almost-complete restitution. There was joy in my heart as I slipped the little ashtray onto a table. Of course, it had never been missed.