A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (8 page)

Yet a more moral and honorable man never drew breath. He taught me that there was no necessary connection between Christian faith and Christian conduct.

***

As children we often accompanied Mother to church on Sunday while Father played golf. She was interested in religion, but as a part of philosophy in which she was widely read; it never seemed to answer an emotional need in her. For her offspring the celebration of religion was pretty well confined to the sentimentality of the Christmas story. My older brother, whom I much admired, made no secret of his firm atheism, and when I asked him if he didn't even believe in an afterlife, he assured me that I might survive just long enough to hear his mocking laugh.

At Groton, the massive personality of Endicott Peabody, then in his late seventies and known as the Rector, dominated the campus. He had founded the school half a century before. My father and half the fathers of my classmates had been his students; they were as much in awe of him as we were. There was no appeal, at least in our minds, from his decrees. We came almost to identify him with the deity whom he so passionately and articulately adored. To doubt any article of his creed would seem an impertinence to an absolute authority.

Ultimately I came to recognize that the rector had a benignant side, that his love of the school he had created was genuine, and that his concern reached out to every boy under his jurisdiction. Watching him praying strongly aloud in chapel, one noticed how his eyes sometimes closed, how his great body almost quivered with emotion. It was hard to believe that God did not hear him or carefully consider his positions. A species of minor but sentimental religious ecstasy was born in me at this period.

I decided with the sanction (or was it the indifference?) of my parents to be confirmed into the Episcopal church, because, of course, the rector would do the confirming, and I attended his conferences on the subject where he gave to each boy present his unmistakable personal attention.

Greedy to be singled out by the great man, I would ask questions in the answers to which I had no real interest, such as: Was it sanitary for so many to sip wine from the same communion cup? I simply wanted that large balding head turned in my direction and that intense gray-eyed stare fixed on my puny self as I heard the grave response: "Others have been concerned about that, my boy. You may have noticed that after each communicant has drunk I give the cup a strong wipe with my napkin."

After my confirmation I remained a believer until my graduation from Groton. I had no trouble with the creed. I said my prayers at night, and I rose early to attend Holy Communion on Sundays, which was celebrated before the school breakfast. But one day a friend of mine, a deeply thoughtful Boston boy whom I much admired, Sam Shaw, suggested, as we happened to be walking past the then-empty chapel, that we enter and sit there for a bit. We did so for perhaps a quarter of an hour. When we came out, Sam said, "That was fine, wasn't it?" And it
had
been fine, though I knew that Sam embraced no religion whatsoever. Nor has he ever subsequently. Yet our little visit struck me then and still does as a deeply religious moment.

Later I would return to the family Presbyterianism, but my faith was largely gone, and never really came back, even in some tight moments during the war. I came to share the amiable agnosticism of so many of my contemporaries and endeavored to live up to their moral code. I found the Christian sexual taboos unnecessary.

I played for a time the sophomoric game of picking holes in the gospel, correcting the predictions and doubting the miracles, but ended by rejecting the virgin birth and settling for the theory, tacitly held, I believe, by millions of so-called Christians, that Jesus was simply a gifted mortal. I could never even give the church credit for good lives; it seemed to me that it valued faith above all, and I couldn't see why it was virtuous to believe in a god and sinful not to. I could quite see, however, why it was important for a church that we should.

What I could never quite eliminate from my evaluations of the religions of the world was the death and mayhem that they had inflicted on people who questioned their creeds. It seems that as soon as the banner of a new faith has been firmly planted in converted soil, its priesthood invents savage punishment for heresy.

It's all very well to argue that, at least in the case of the worshippers of Christ, physical retribution has been abolished, but it took force to make the churches agree, and they have retained the concept of hell to let them perpetrate in the hereafter what they can no longer accomplish on earth.

I recall a performance of Verdi's
Don Carlos
at the Metropolitan Opera where the auto-da-fe scene was brilliantly and effectively staged. The condemned heretics marched glumly across the stage toward the explosion of light in the wings representing the fire that awaited them. Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, famous Catholic convert, in the box next to mine audibly protested. I had the impression that it was the representation of the past rather than its condemnation that really upset her.

How far back in the past was burning still an acceptable form of execution in supposedly civilized countries? I believe a woman was burned alive for the murder of her husband in England in one of the first years of the nineteenth century. And it is possible to put ourselves in the mind of long-dead people who, with perfect complacency, did things of hideous cruelty, if those things happen to be described by a vivid and sympathetic writer.

Take Madame de Sevigne, for example, who wrote such copious letters to her beloved daughter. It is hard not to love a woman so kind, so witty, so seemingly humane and sensible, so like the finest women of our own day. But what is this that we encounter? The marquise is going along with a family plan to enhance her grandson's inheritance and his chance for an advantageous matrimonial match by transferring his sister's dowry to him and locking up for life the poor little robbed thing in a convent!

"Oh, she will be quite comfortable there," the grandmother coolly opines. "The abbess is her aunt." "On est la niece de Madame!"

***

Saying all this brings me to the question of what influence Christianity had on my contemporaries at Groton and later. I don't think very much. Few as adults even attended divine services, and only two became priests. We heard, it was true, of a devout group of boys at Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and one who became a Trappist monk, but this was rare. Was the Ivy League of my day then a godless one? Perhaps so, but it certainly did not lack ideals.

I used to say to my father: "If my classmates should ever run this country all would be well." The irony of my life is that they did indeed have a hand in it. And every one of them was a fervent backer of the war in Vietnam.

M
Y SIX YEARS
at Groton, 1930–1935, coincided closely with those of the Great Depression, but the Great Crash of 1929, which devastated our world, affected my family little, though we had reason to regret the move we had just made to a splendid penthouse on the highest point of Park Avenue. I was completely absorbed by boarding school and essentially unaware of the outside world until I had to go home to have my tonsils out. I needed a tutor to make up for lost school time, and Mother asked me if there was anyone from the old Bovee faculty I would like. The school was terminated; the teachers were all out of work.

"Oh, I'd love Mr. Evans, but you'd never get him."

"Oh, I think I might."

And poor, dear Mr. Evans duly appeared, looking sad and gaunt. Mother, leaving for her day, told me to be sure to ask him to stay for lunch. I forgot, and when she returned and found him gone she was irritated.

"Why was it so important?" I wanted to know.

"Because he's hungry!"

***

During these difficult times, Father remained a member of the Davis Polk firm, and there was always an income to be gleaned from the financing and reorganization of the great corporations it represented. When things were so bad that the older members had to reduce their percentages of the take, they would do as John Davis instructed them. He would take each older partner aside and say, if to Father, "Howland, we old farts have to move over a bit."

Sometimes, as Father put it, when the figures came out, it would be apparent that only one old fart had moved over, but that was all right. Davis's charm and the eminence of his political and legal career lent weight to his decisions for the firm. In a brilliant but competitive partnership it was always helpful to have a strong leader.

In the early years of the Depression, there came a time when Father was seriously concerned, without validity, about a corporate bond issue that he had approved: Would the firm have to buy it in? Would he survive financially? Then his father, John W. Auchincloss, lost the bulk of his fortune on the stock market, and my father's siblings blamed him unfairly for not guiding the doddering old man with a firmer hand. My poor parents had a nervous crackup, and we didn't know where we were at. Despite my sympathies for the disadvantaged, I sometimes think economic insecurity is most taxing when sudden and when its victims are least accustomed to bearing it.

Mother purported to derive comfort from my fourteen-year-old's smart-alecky sagacity. "It's the end of something," I told her pompously, "but not of everything."

Despite these ruminations the bad luck ended as suddenly as it had come. The bond issue was not invalid, after all; my grandfather's affairs were somehow patched up. Father recovered and went back to work.

I have never understood my grandfather's financial career. His older sister Sarah returned to Scotland and made a fortunate marriage to Sir James Coats, the great thread tycoon. Grandfather, as a young man, formed a partnership with his brother Hugh Dudley called Auchincloss Brothers to represent Coates Thread in America. They did so well that Grandfather was able to build a summer house in Newport that is still one of the show places of that opulent colony. Yet when Sir James asked him and his brother to take into their partnership an American son-in-law of Sir James, they refused, saying they would choose their own American representative. So that golden business was lost. Grandfather went into other enterprises, some of which failed, and lost his directorship in Illinois Central by talking back to E. H. Harriman. He lived well all his long life, but he was losing money even in the bull market of 1929, and when he died in 1937 he left an estate of only $300,000. His brother Hugh Dudley had done better; he had married the daughter of one of John D. Rockefeller's partners. That there was something a bit cloudy in Grandfather's upper story may explain his belief that an ancestor called Stuart gave him a claim to the throne of Scotland.

My father's older and my mother's two younger brothers did well enough for themselves in the Depression and caused no concern in the family, but this was less true of Father's three sisters. Aunt Betty, the eldest, had married Percy Jennings, son of the famous and wealthy corporate lawyer Frederick B. Jennings, whose mansion on lower Park Avenue later became the Princeton Club, but whose wealth was largely dissipated by poor family investments. Fortunately, there were some trusts in a bank to ward off total disaster.

Aunt Caroline, wife of a rich doctor of the Fowler meatpacking family, was the hardest hit, as her husband had invested heavily in mortgaged brownstone residences that were foreclosed on him. She used to say that she sometimes took the Madison Avenue trolley in lieu of the Fifth Avenue bus to save a nickel. Finally there was that perennial victim of hard times, the unwed daughter, my aunt Josie, who became a trained nurse, unique in our family, who used to mildly complain that it was hardly fair to raise a daughter with expectations of economic means and leave her to fend for herself.

At school in the Depression I heard a great deal of families "cutting down," but in our world it was largely the luxuries that were being eliminated. The children even of the hardest hit were apt to be kept in private schools, often on scholarships originally planned for the impoverished classes. Innumerable cousins and friends still managed to get out of the hot, hot city in summer.

I think the dividing line for me between the pre-1929 Depression days and all that followed was the line of huge derivative French chateaux and Italian palazzos that lines Fifth Avenue from Forty-second Street to Ninety-sixth. Almost all were destroyed by the 1920s and '30s. They had been erected to show off the new wealth of business leaders in the economic boom that followed the Civil War, and many, particularly those commissioned by the Vanderbilt clan, were designed by Richard Morris Hunt, whose sculpted image appropriately adorns a colonnade of the park side of the avenue near Seventieth Street. Some of the mansions were handsome enough, but the prevailing look was vulgar. It is hard to imagine anyone living in them today.

It might be difficult today to find men or women who take themselves that seriously. For how can you live in a palace without occasionally imagining yourself royal? We still have rich, even super rich, but they know they're not royal. The guests so festively attired as kings and queens from Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt's famous costume ball in the 1880s may have been not so sure.

I
ADMIRED THE WAY
Queen Mary occasionally appeared, covered with jewels, in the New York Sunday rotogravure, but I found that my admiration was not shared by my Irish nurse, Maggie. When I asked her once if the queen had to go to the bathroom like ordinary people she retorted: "She does, and makes a big stink."

Yet Britain played little role in my young life though my ancestry was totally English or Scottish and, with the exception of the Auchinclosses who did not leave their native Paisley until 1803, went back to colonial days. Little contact remained between the American and Scottish branches except for one important one, that between my grandfather and his sister Sarah's husband, James Coats, the severance of which led to a grave reversal in my grandfather's hitherto successful business career.