A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (7 page)

A non-Buckley boy in a class heavily stacked with Buckley alums, I became even more of a social leper. I could expect to be struck or kicked as I passed from classroom to classroom or even to be beaten up by a mob. I had no friends and was even subject to a sexual violation that would have created a major scandal today. Yet I must emphasize that every person in the administration of that school would have been horrified had they known what was going on. They were helpless then just as their counterparts are these days. Boys cannot be shielded from one another. Nor did I ever complain, either to a parent or teacher. I believe it was all part of the inevitable process of becoming a man in a dreary world.

I was perfectly aware that many boys played games in the cubicles at night called "mutual masturbation." I doubt if these included sodomy; the very word might have frightened them off. This practice left little aftereffect that I could see: not one member of the form became an acknowledged homosexual in maturity. But there was one difference separating this sort of relationship between boys in England and America. In America it was never called love, even by the boys themselves. This would have been regarded as hopelessly degrading to their masculinity. In English literature you find terms suggesting homosexuality used quite freely about youths who would later happily forsake their own sex to become the warriors of the light brigade. What we call the bad habits of naughty boys can develop into the military force that sustains an empire.

Certainly one of the most mysterious and memorable figures to emerge from my youth was Jimmy Regan, longtime senior master at Groton School. He was the executive officer, to use a naval term, to the all-dominating figure of the Reverend Endicott Peabody, founder and veteran headmaster, whose exact opposite in character and personality Regan appeared to be. For he was a wispy little man, impossible to associate with the mildest athleticism, perfectly dressed, of quiet good manners yet curiously forceful, who took for granted that he had succeeded in establishing his absolute rule on the campus and need no longer raise his voice. He deferred only to the headmaster but there his deference was complete.

Regan was precisely what a great headmaster needed, and Peabody was well aware of this. The spirit, the fire, the leadership of the school was all provided by the principal; it was Regan's job to look into every corner and cranny of the institution and be sure that the machinery was working. And tactfully or even ruthlessly correct it if it wasn't.

Regan was regarded with something like awe by the faculty and boys; they felt his power but one didn't see it. He was always equable, always reasonable. Little was known about his background. Small wonder that there were those who thought he might once have been a Jesuit priest. He would have been a good one.

But he was always a kind and benevolent man, and he eased the burden of administration on the aging shoulders of a greater one to whom he was passionately loyal. They were a great team. And in the summer vacation Jimmy Regan went to a little village in the north of France which had suffered cruel damage in World War I and where he found ample opportunities for charity from what seem to have been his adequate private means.

In my day, the young, unmarried masters who gave so much to the intellectual life of a boys' boarding school were eyed quite closely by the often suspicious and wary members of the administration. A very discreet closet gay, particularly if elderly, might be tolerated on the faculty so long as no boy was ever given a suggestion of the teacher's preferences, but others less careful faced challenges. A popular and attractive master at Groton was let go for having a sentimental summer correspondence with a handsome boy—no touching even alleged.

It was commonly said, at least in his French class of my year, that Mr. Regan, parading past our chairs as he spouted, with a perfect Gallic accent, from our text, would sometimes pause before a particularly robust boy and rub the back of his neck casually and sometimes even slip a sly hand down the back of his trousers, his fingers approaching the backside.

He was playing with fire. How could he dare? Because he never went further. And knew he would never go further. The boy would never complain and knew he would not be listened to if he did. The groping could be explained as unintentional. Still, it was much commented on among the boys. We all love to bring the great down to our level or lower.

Some years ago at the American Academy of Arts and Letters I encountered a fellow member, George Rickey, the world famous sculptor, then ninety, who, as a charming and very muscular young man, had briefly taught at Groton. I asked him to dine, and he replied: "Gladly, but on condition that we discuss nothing but Groton School in 1933."

I agreed, and before our meal was finished we happed upon the old rumors of Jimmy Regan's sexual tastes.

"Of course, even the faculty heard those rumors," he told me. "One day he invited me to go into Boston with him for a concert. We would spend the night at his club there, the Somerset. He drove me in his big Cadillac, and after the concert we went to his room where we undressed and got into our pajamas. He then placed a bottle of gin on the table between our beds. Now, I thought, if he ever tries anything, this will be it. We had a drink and went to sleep. Nothing happened."

Nor do I think anything ever did. Jimmy Regan was a good and conscientious man. He did not believe that pedophilia was proper conduct for a teacher of male youth, and he was never going to give into its urges. Others might have different views; that did not concern him. What he was given to do in this life, he would do perfectly and that was all that need concern him. If he occasionally let himself show a trifle too much affection for a fine-looking youth, it could not possibly do the latter any harm, for even if the boy was not one to reject a same-sex relationship, he certainly would not choose one with a small, wispy old man.

At last, after a dormitory party in which my every extremity was covered with flung ice cream, there was a lull in my persecution. The evening was broken up by the arrival of the kindly dorm master who rescued me and sent the others to bed. Then he helped me look for my dental biteplate, which had been lost in the fray. I told him it had cost my parents $100, an astronomic sum, and for the first time I burst into racking sobs. He was kind to me as nobody had been, found my biteplate, put his arm around my shoulders, and sent me to bed almost consoled. (He was the same man compelled to leave Groton after his letters to the handsome boy, but I always recall him with the deepest affection.)

As I have said, a lull now followed, as it seemed my persecution had begun to bore its leaders. I even picked up one or two friends. Then I had an aggravated case of tonsillitis and had to go home for a couple of months, and finally it was, blessedly, summer. I behaved as I had been, by example, taught. That is, I made no mention of my unhappiness. Not a single complaint about school was directed to my parents during the long hot months, and they had no reason to think that things weren't going well, except that my marks were poor. My father was a graduate of the school himself and under the same headmaster, but he would have taken me out of Groton in a moment had he suspected the truth. He was a rare thing, a jock who never reproached his son for not being one.

My mother suspected that all was not well for me at school and spotted the redness on my tongue in September when it was time to go back to the seat of my torture. I had smeared it with Mercurochrome in an effort to make myself ill so that I could stay home. Not surprisingly, given my mother's perspicacity, it didn't work. But on this occasion, perhaps chastened by the previous year, I didn't dare confess. The redness was attributed to something I ate, and I was duly returned to Groton as a second former.

A new problem awaited me. My Latin teacher, Fritz DeVeau, a dry, sarcastic bachelor of independent means (he spent his summers in Bar Harbor where his wit and acid realism made him popular even with my parents) filled me for some reason with a paralyzing awe. I was not doing well in Latin anyway, but I was hopeless when translating for him. He would give me a daily zero on a recitation, simply commenting: "Another goose egg, Auchincloss." It was said mockingly in the class that my marks looked like a chain across the page. This affected me in other classes, and the faculty actually began to discuss the advisability of my repeating a year. Mother came to discuss it.

The idea of adding a whole year to my Groton sentence of six filled me with a wild terror. I would literally have preferred death. But in my desperation I conceived a plan of escape.

"Get me dropped from 2A Latin to 2B," I begged Mother, "and I think I can make it."

Mother, reluctant as perhaps never before to interfere (perhaps even she was cowed by Groton's hallowed halls) with the school administration, recognized the extent of my misery. She brought herself to tackle the formidable and veteran headmaster, who told her that my teachers believed I was simply lazy.

"But what can we really lose?" she argued, attempting to advance my plan. "He seems morbidly terrified at the idea of repeating a year."

God bless her; it worked. I knew it was a great concession, and I was resolved to make good. Like a drowning man clutching the lifesaver that had been finally tossed to him I fought my way to the shore. I entered the classroom of 2B Latin and was greeted by its master, Mr. Andrews, a stout, dumpy, funny-looking middle-aged man who had been promoted to the faculty from being the headmaster's secretary and whose face bore a huge purple birthmark. But—forgive the cliché—he had a heart of the purest gold.

"I hear you've come down to us because you're lazy," he said. Then he winked at me.

How I loved that man! My marks turned around.

In the following year my grades soared from the bottom of the class to the top, and I was returned to the aegis of the once terrible DeVeau, who now appeared to have been a paper tiger and, indeed, became a friend.

I had finally found a chink in the Groton wall through which I could crawl, if not to any great popularity, at least to the respectability of high marks. I could now afford to eliminate all hated sports from my life except for the minimum required by the school schedule. At home I continued to enjoy a game of tennis, but the only spectator sport I ever indulged in was the bull fight, on a rare visit to Spain or Mexico, and this I soon gave up as too bloody. But the unfortunate effect on my personality was that I allowed myself to consider this turning of my back on athletics as the sign of a superiority of character, and I made something of an ass of myself at Groton by not attending matches with visiting teams and scorning any manifestation of "school spirit."

This led, at one point, to a clash with my roommate, Bill Bundy. He and his younger brother, McGeorge, would later become world famous as security advisers to presidents Kennedy and Johnson and ardent supporters of the Vietnam War. In fact, they earned from David Halberstam the ironical title of "the best and the brightest," despite the fact it was they who helped plunge us into disaster.

Well, returning from the Groton library where I had spent a Saturday afternoon
not
attending a football game with a visiting team, which we had lost, I found Bill actually in tears over the defeat. Foolishly I mocked him, and he was so angry that he arranged to have a new roommate. We made it up later, but it was not the best way for me to make friends.

Although McGeorge was in a lower form, he was the younger brother who became the better friend of mine. Both brothers shared an intense feeling about internecine sport, and I have sometimes wondered if the spirit of "Groton must not lose" did not play a role in their reluctance to face defeat in an unwinnable and unnecessary war.

Mac, as president of the dramatic society, chose for his annual play Shakespeare's
Henry V,
of which he seemed entirely to accept the conventional interpretation that it is a hymn to patriotic and military glory.

But this was only so far as the king is depicted in his heroic speeches. The faculty coach, Malcolm Strachan, who believed that Shakespeare was seeking secretly to convey his own pacifist credo in the lines of the clowns, persuaded Mac that it would make a more interesting production to portray both interpretations. At any rate, what stood out was Mac's splendid acting as Henry V glorifying a totally aggressive war. I cannot help but note that it is recorded that, in difficult moments of the Vietnamese conflict, Mac recited some of the speeches he remembered from
Henry V
to LBJ.

***

When I was president of the dramatics club, the year before Mac, I should have had the lead in the play chosen, Moliere's
The Would-be Gentleman.
Yet my cousin Gordon Auchincloss—last seen in non-theatrical circumstances—was considered better for the part. This was disappointing, and I had to content myself with the secondary role of Dorante, but much worse was to follow. In my principal scene with the elegant marquise Doriméne, I clumsily sat on the edge of a curtain dropping to the stage. So tight did I pull it that the audience feared it would come down, and so missed all the words.

I
CANNOT RECALL
that religion played any important role in my life until I went to Groton School at the age of twelve. The Auchinclosses, being of Scottish origin, were naturally Presbyterians, and in my grandfather Auchincloss's generation very strict and sober ones.

My grandmother Auchincloss, of English descent, born a Russell of New York and Newport, belonged to the more fashionable Episcopal church, but as a dutiful spouse, she accompanied her husband on Sundays to his Presbyterian temple. Unlike him, as it happened, she was very devout, though it did the poor lady little good at the end when she died in an agony created by the fear of hell's fire. Her ending confirmed my father in his lifelong antipathy to religion.

"I never knew ease of conscience and independence of mind," he told me once, "until I wrapped up religion once and for all and threw it in the East River."