Manhattan Monologues (14 page)

I worked long hours, sometimes as many as four or five nights a week. It didn't hurt my marriage, because that was going too badly to be further hurt. Nora had taken a scantily paid job as the Washington reporter of a small radical New York magazine, and she followed congressional debates and committee hearings with an interest that swelled along with her own leftist leanings. She had lost all of her old awe of my superiority in legal matters and had nothing but freely voiced contempt for my enthusiasm for Justice Davenport. And she was too doctrinaire not to follow up her contempt for an opinion with contempt for its holder.

"What do you think of the President's Court bill?" she demanded sharply one morning, as we were drinking coffee before our departure for work. Her pale face loomed at me accusingly across the table.

"I think it's an outrage, of course. He wants to stack the Court with new appointees whom he can trust to tear up the Constitution. There's been nothing like it since the Rebs fired on Fort Sumter."

"Only it may prove more successful."

"It'll never pass."

"Don't be too sure. I have a closer eye on the Hill than you do. And anyway, whether or not it passes, it may scare those old birds out of their hatchet work."

"My old bird doesn't scare easily."

"I'll bet that's so. But remember, we need only one of that unamiable quintet to change what he may wrongly call his thoughts."

"We?"

"Yes, my dear Peter, we. In case you haven't observed, I've moved considerably to the left, and I now regard the whole New Deal as basically much too conservative. Also, my paper wants me to move back to New York to take over a weekly column."

"And you're going?"

"Damn right, I'm going. It's a big promotion."

"Does this mean that you're leaving me?"

"It means I'm leaving Washington."

It was odd how little it took to sunder our marriage. I supposed that was because so little had gone into putting it together. When Nora was through with a man, she tossed him away like a used Kleenex.

The judge and I had become almost intimate as we worked together over his opinions. He associated little with his brethren on the Court, even with those of his persuasion, and his truculent reputation kept the other clerks from dropping in to our offices. When he inquired politely once about my wife's health and general welfare, and was told that she had moved to New York, he asked no further questions, but a few days later he invited me to save my rent money and move into a spare bedroom in his big house.

"You'll have regular meals, and good ones, and if we should work at night in my library, you won't have that long walk home. And my good butler will give you all the drinks you want."

I was delighted, as the judge already comprised most of my social life in the capital, and I figured that if, as I planned, I should one day write his biography, our new proximity would give me ample opportunity to glean information about his earlier decades. But I had not been long ensconced in my comfortable new quarters, and made welcome by the two servants, who were glad to have a younger presence in that staid atmosphere, than I discovered a side of my host that was not agreeable to see.

It may indeed have been a new side of his nature, brought out by the striking events of that time, rather than a festering sore that had suddenly erupted. We had witnessed the defeat of Mr. Roosevelt's Court-packing bill and had prematurely rejoiced, only to discover that the victory was decidedly a Pyrrhic one. For under the agile maneuvering of the chief justice, one of our majority of five defected, and the era of invalidation of grasping legislation was over. With the resignations that followed, the President at last had the Court that his defeated bill would have given him, and the New Deal was the law of the land.

My chief took it badly, too badly. He lost his biting humor and became overtly vindictive. At our dinners together he signaled constantly at his disapproving butler to refill his wine glass, and in the library afterward, even when we were working, he had a whiskey and soda before him.

"It's all over now," he would mutter, half to himself. "That happy-go-lucky Hudson River squire can do anything he wants with our sacred rights and privileges. There's not much to choose between him and the man Hitler, except that Roosevelt won't go after the Jews. Isn't he one himself? Don't they say his name was changed from Rosenfeld?"

More prejudices, alas, than anti-Semitism began to emerge from his objurgations. I noted in him, to my considerable dismay, a tendency to slander opponents, actual or potential, to his way of thinking, with the peculiar meanness of certain extreme right-wingers. I offered no objection, for such was not my function, and anyway I knew it would be futile. If, for example, our discussion fell on questions of unemployment insurance, he was apt to comment on the laziness or unwillingness to work of many of its recipients and would quote such canards as the old one of the man who came to pick up his paycheck in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. He would carry this over into the field of criminal law, suggesting that the victim in a rape case may have invited the attack by her scanty attire or loose conduct, and opining that the execution of an innocent person through a misidentification was not so grave a matter if the man was believed to have committed other heinous crimes.

I suffered under this for several months, but my breaking point did not come until the day when I was walking home with the judge after a day's work, and a reporter tagged along beside us, popping impertinent questions at the grimly stalking and unresponsive figure of the jurist. At last, about to concede defeat, he flung a final query.

"Are you ever going to retire, Mr. Justice?"

At this, the judge, having to pause for a red light, swung his head around at the young man and snarled, "Not while that son-of-a-bitch of a cripple is still in the White House!"

The reporter gasped and fled, and I was silent all the way to the house. But I had made up my mind, then and there, to resign my clerkship, and on the following Monday I informed my chief that I had decided the time had come for me to get started in the active practice of law. He could hardly object, as he had felt it incumbent on him to warn me not to overdo my time as a law clerk, and he was good enough to give me a glowing recommendation to his old Wall Street firm, where I am an associate to this day.

When I returned to New York, I had a meeting with Nora to see whether there was anything left of our marriage. She was very definite that there was not, and we agreed on an amicable divorce. She was already enamored of the editor-in-chief of her Red rag and had, I believe, become a card-carrying communist. We argued for a whole evening about the scandal of the Russian political trials, but she was adamant in her undying support of Stalin.

And so, disgusted alike with left and right, and the dangerous words that both employ, I have settled down to the euphoria of figures and try to lose myself in the blessed impersonality of taxes. Like death, they will always be with us.

N
EW YEAR'S DAY
is the morn for resolutions, and today, being the first of 1951 and opening a half-century, seems well timed. I take pen in hand therefore to record with an accuracy as scrupulous as my power permits, for the ultimate benefit of my two sons, now nine and ten, who are being raised largely outside my parental control, that they may understand, when mature enough to read this memorandum (which I shall leave with my lawyer to ensure its preservation) that their father was not the moral monster that their mother and her kin have depicted. Whatever the boys may conclude, they will have had the chance to hear my side of the story—the story, as I may put it, of my sexual philosophy and its application to my life.

My family background will be familiar to them; it is pretty much the same as their mother's. The Belknaps were old Manhattan of English source, Episcopal burghers of brownstone respectability, with the virtues and vices of their class. One of my father's grandfathers bought a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War; the other died in action, a gallant cavalry colonel. Few of the family stood out from the crowd, nor do I think they much wanted to. Pierce Belknap, my father, was a middle partner in a middle-sized but distinguished Wall Street law firm that bore the name of a deceased forebear to whom he largely owed his position. Stella, my mother, was known for her looks and charm, as well as for her almost too exquisite little dinner parties. We lived in a constantly redecorated brownstone on lower Park Avenue and spent our summers on the north shore of Long Island. I was sent, after years at the Browning School, to Saint Jude's, a church boarding academy for boys in New Hampshire, a great gray Gothic conglomerate where God may have once been and left. I had one sibling, a younger sister, Rhoda, who was shrilly and ineffectively at war with her family and life.

I was christened Robert, but Mother dubbed me Robin, perhaps in the disappointed hope that I would turn out gentler than I promised, and the name, which I have never liked, has stuck. I was hardly an amiable child, and certainly not like the bird that was my namesake, the herald of spring. If I was always strong for my age, I was sullen of disposition, dark-haired and dark-complexioned, an ugly enough brute, though my appearance improved as I grew up, at least in the eyes of one of the sexes. I may quote what my best (and sometimes, I think, my only real) friend, Newton Chandler, said of me once, perhaps not entirely jokingly: "Robin looked like a surly dead-end kid, but he was so quiet and stand-offish that one began to suspect he was hiding some inner sensibility, perhaps even a yearning for sympathy and affection, but when one approached him with this in mind, it was to find that one's first impression had been the right one."

Why was I thus truculent? I can't be sure, but I speculate that it had to do with some childhood concept of my parents being engaged in a losing battle that I could always see was bound to be lost. A battle against whom or what? Were they Romans resisting barbarians? I don't know. Perhaps it was a battle against the whole world. And why was I so sure that it would be lost? Because I sensed the power of the barbarian in myself? Something like that.

Daddy was already lost; Mother was the real fighter, and I admired her just as strongly as I refused to show it. She was a distinctly pretty, slightly diminutive woman, with lovely large inquisitive greenish eyes, always perfectly clad for every occasion, without a spot on the white ensembles that she affected or a single one of her beautiful, genuinely blond hairs out of place. People were always saying that one had to be particularly trim and well-ordered when one went to Mother's house, but that, of course, was nonsense. Women like Mother don't give a damn what
you
wear; their rules apply only to themselves. And Mother carried this principle to an extreme. For some arcane reason—and she was not in the least religiously inclined—she apparently conceived of herself as the instrument of forces that required her interiors to be perfectly decorated, her entertainments exquisite, her guests provided with every amenity, and in her own life, her manners to be charming and her good deeds good. Now what, I would sometimes ask myself, in my rare efforts to be reasonable, was so wrong with all that, except for the toll that the constant industry took on her far from robust constitution? Wasn't that
her
look-out?

It might have been, had the toll not also fallen on Daddy. If the rest of the world had been exempted from the dark destiny that demanded such high standards of Stella Belknap, her husband had not been. His pledge at the altar had joined him ineluctably to her fate. I sometimes fancied that Mother must have chosen him with the same instinct that a parasite plant or animal chooses its host. Yet the relationship didn't seem to be one of symbiosis. I couldn't see that Daddy benefited from it in any way except for the obvious fact that he always adored her. Utterly compliant to her every demand, he never criticized her except for an occasional sly joke, half-whispered to a bystander and designed perhaps to convince the latter that he was more independent than might appear. If Mother overheard any such mild protest, she ignored it. She could readily distinguish between the muttered growl of an incipient coup d'état and the subdued squeal that may be safely—indeed, wisely—allowed the victim whom the gods had assigned to her task force to carry out, not her purpose, but theirs.

Daddy's professional life was spent in the shadow of his grandfather. Judge Belknap had been something of a figure in corporate reorganizations before his elevation to the bench, and my unhappy progenitor continually tried to convince his skeptical partners that his bearing the name of the deceased justified his share of the firm profits, which every year received a new slashing. For Daddy looked the part of a senior partner much more than he was one: tall, handsome, elegantly dressed, with fine graying hair and a commanding nose and chin. His full-length portrait in the reception hall provided an appropriate introduction to the long corridors of legal aptitudes, but it certainly did not reflect the strained inner tension of a man whose daily concern was preserving a diminishing income and an eroding capital to meet Mother's incessant demands.

It was not that Mother was unaware of financial problems. She would have been a perfectly good sport had they gone bankrupt and would have toiled as a cleaning woman to support him. Her dusky gods, as I dimly made out, would have asked less of her had the money been gone—it might even have come as a relief. It was simply her bounden duty—and, with marriage, now his—while the money was extant, to spend it as the powers demanded.

The curse, or whatever it was, was not extended to the children. Rhoda, who reacted with the contemptuous fury of a rebellious teenager to what she deemed Mother's worldly and snobbish standards, beat her head in vain against the wall of Mother's utter indifference to her protests. Mother would mildly deplore Rhoda's rudeness, her poor school record, her messy clothes and slangy remarks, but she accepted her as a convinced missionary might accept a Hottentot who was beyond conversion. Rhoda undoubtedly felt there was a lack of basic love in such an attitude, and I'm afraid Rhoda was right.