Manhattan Monologues (2 page)

As we cautiously approached the monster, it picked up our scent and turned to us, raising its trunk formidably and flapping its great ears. Even Father seemed to have a second thought.

"Ambrose, quick! Run back to the others; I can handle this."

And I would have done so! I would! But I was literally paralyzed with panic. My legs were two stone pillars; I couldn't even raise my rifle. The bull was charging now, a thundering black cloud of terror, and I knew my end had come.

I heard the crack of Father's gun, and the huge beast went down, a rolling mass of agony, then suddenly still.

"By God, you're a cool one!" Father cried. "You stood there without blinking. And you were a gentleman, too. You let me have the first go at him when there mightn't have been a second!"

"Oh, I knew you'd bring him down," I heard myself say.

That night I was struck with a fever, which nobody attributed to my trauma, and I was sent back to the base camp. By the time I had recuperated, the safari was over.

***

The next decade brought great changes and something like peace to my life. In the first place, Father lost the greater part of his by then diminished fortune when the Knickerbocker Trust Company closed its doors in the panic of 1907. There was no longer the possibility of my leading the economically carefree life that he and his brothers had enjoyed; it was now incumbent upon me to earn my own living, which fortunately I was not only happy but relieved to do. After Harvard College, I attended Harvard Law and then secured a good position as a clerk in a leading Wall Street firm.

Father was constantly apologetic that his poor management had condemned me to what he downrated as the passive life of a desk grub. But to me it was the pleasant calm of a dull gray restful heaven after the flickering red of adventure. I believed that my fears and anticipations were over, that I
had
been tested, after all, and not found wanting as a man, and that I could now look forward, like millions of other males, to the routine of a mild usefulness. To cap it all, I married a girl who had the same ambition—or lack of it, as the Vollards undoubtedly would have put it.

Ellen, the child of Long Island neighbors whom I had known and liked since childhood, had always been a quiet little girl, sober and serious, who from her earliest days had known exactly what she wanted from life: a faithful loving husband with a steady job and a nursery full of children. Both of us tended to look at passion and excitement as picturesque storms to be viewed from behind securely closed windows. Ellen got on well with my parents, though I suspect she regarded Father as a little cracked. However, she never said so, and he became very fond of her and doted on the three little children who were born to us in the first five years of our marriage.

The opening of the Great War in 1914 sounded as the knell to bring me back from a decade of illusion to the grim standards of virility. Of course, in the three years of our national neutrality, I was always aware of the chorus of voices in favor of our nonparticipation in the conflict and prayed that they would prevail, but I never doubted that we would ultimately be drawn in. I knew again what I had earlier known: that it was part of my doom.

Needless to say, Father, like his god the Colonel, was howling for war, and he took for granted that I was on his side, nor did I seek for a moment to disillusion him. I accepted my fate with the passivity of despair and could only shrug when Ellen pointed out that if we did go to war, I would surely be exempted as a married man with a family to support.

"Father has received an inheritance from Uncle Tom," I reminded her. "He has already undertaken to support you and the children if I should sign up."

"And leave me with three infants and one of them an asthmatic! If you do that, my love, you'll find the Germans easier to face than the spouse you return to!"

I was beginning to learn that Father was not the only force in my life. And as the carnage in Europe became more and more appalling, with each side sacrificing untold thousands of young men to capture or recapture a few yards of barbed wire, I started to wonder whether I might not one day rather face Father's wrath than expose myself to it. At night, while Ellen snored mildly at my side, I lay awake, feverishly picturing the mud, the rats, the horrible dawn attacks after an overhead deafening barrage, the stooping rush over barbed wire to bayonet some poor German lad in the guts, or, more likely, to be bayoneted by him, the endless terror and the damp dark waiting, waiting, waiting. And when I slept at last my nightmares were worse. It was almost a relief when we heard the asthmatic gasping of our youngest and had to rise and rush to alleviate his pain.

As soon as Congress had declared war on the central powers, Colonel Roosevelt applied to President Wilson for permission to form his own regiment, in which Father naturally clamored to be included. Of course, the wild offer was turned down, but Father informed me that the Colonel was writing to General Pershing to take his sons Ted and Archie in the first shipments to France and that it might be possible to include me. I had, despite Ellen's first objections, had some military training with Father at the camp at Plattsburg (I had put it to her on the grounds of simple preparedness for any eventuality), and I was now, in a grim mood of acceptance of my destiny, ready to give in to the paternal expectations.

But I faced a kitten who had turned into a tigress.

"Your father and his Colonel make me sick! I wish the President had sent both their superannuated carcasses to France to rot, instead of all the young men on whom our future depends! I'm telling you, Ambrose Vollard, that you are going to apply for exemption from the draft on the perfectly sound and valid ground that you have a large family and a sick baby to support. And that exemption will be granted without question. And not a single solitary soul, except for a couple of crazy Vollards, will either criticize you or think one jot the less of you!"

And that was it. I did what she told me to do. I had become a virtual automaton. My will was crushed.

If that was the ultimate act of cowardice, perhaps the ultimate act of courage lay in my telling Father to his face what I had done.

He said nothing, but his features turned to stone.

Mother intervened. "I think Ambrose is the only person who can be the judge of what he has done, my dear. His decision cannot have been an easy one."

Father closed his eyes and bowed his head. There was another long silence. Finally he made the only comment on the matter he would make to me, then or thereafter.

"I don't know how I am to face the Colonel."

The year that followed, the last of the war, as it turned out, was for me quiet and dull. I was busy at an office badly depleted by men called to the service, and Ellen was, as usual, much occupied with the children, particularly with our asthmatic son, who fortunately was much improved. I was in no way criticized by friends for not being in uniform—there were too many in the same boat—but Ellen and I nonetheless rarely went out at night, content to spend our evenings reading or listening to the radio. Yet my underlying mood was one of consistent if mild depression.

Father treated me, when, as before, Ellen and I dined with him and Mother on Sunday nights, with the same gruff politeness he would have exhibited to any guest at his table. He in- quired sympathetically about his grandchildren, sought my opinion politely about the wine he offered, inquired perfunctorily about my law practice, but it was noticeable that he never discussed the war with me. I had wanted no part in it; very well, I would hear nothing of it from him. In a way I was no longer his son. When word came of Quentin Roosevelt's death, his plane shot down behind German lines, he mourned as if Quentin had been his son.

And, of course, I hated it. I may not have been given the white feather by the world, but I knew I deserved it in Father's eyes, and was it not in Father's eyes that I had my real existence? Could I never be free of my obsession? For what reason, now that I had become, inside his mind as well as outside it, the poor creature he had long denied I was, could I not be at liberty to go my own benighted way in peace?

Perhaps I would have, had he not died, shortly after the death of his beloved hero, the great Theodore, in 1919. Both men were worn and prematurely old at only sixty-one. The shock to me was such as to throw me into a kind of nervous breakdown, which might have necessitated my going for a time to a sanatorium, had not a stern talk with my mother formed the beginning of what looked to be a cure, or at least an alleviation.

As I have said, Mother had left my training largely to Father, but I had always known that she still kept an eye on me. Although she never openly challenged her husband's standards, she seemed to live, resolutely if quietly, distinctly apart from them. Of course, the difference in gender explained some of this but not all. She represented to me, when I seemed to be swimming beyond my power of return, the fine, level, sandy beach to which I would be welcome if I could only get back to it.

One evening, calling on her alone, I felt impelled to confide in her all my misery. When I had finished and she gave me a long close look, I realized that I had broken a barrier.

"I have been waiting for you to tell me all this, my child. I haven't ventured to talk basic truths with you until I was sure you were ready to listen. I have always known that you found your father's principles hard to live up to, but I hesitated to interfere, because you acted so determined to work out your problem your own way, and how was I to know that it wasn't the right way? For a man, anyhow. And besides, you seemed to be succeeding, and your father was always so proud of you, and you appeared so devoted to him. Was it a woman's role to barge in and break this up? Mightn't you both have resented it? And rightly, too? But now you present me with a different case. Your father preached one kind of courage. Maybe I can preach another."

"Courage? Oh, not more of that, please, Mother!"

"Just listen, my dear. We can't get around courage. It's at the root of what's wrong with you. Shall I go ahead?"

"Go ahead."

"I warn you. This is going to hurt."

"I'm ready. Shoot."

"You avoided the draft for a perfectly valid reason. You were over thirty, with a family to support and a sick child. Very good. Nobody had a word to say against you, except, of course, your father. That's the given, the
donnée,
as the French critics say."

"And that is correct."

"Except for one thing. Your family wasn't your real reason. Your real reason was that you were afraid to go to war."

I felt like a piece of ice under a steaming hot faucet. Soon there would be nothing left of me. It was all over. At last.

Mother waited for me to speak, but I didn't, so she went on.

"And now comes the real lesson in courage. You must face the fact that you are a man who was afraid to go to war. It's as simple as that. It doesn't mean that you're afraid of everything. You have been brave enough in other things. It means that you were afraid to be killed or mutilated in the most hideous carnage the world has ever seen. You shared that fear with countless others. Some overcame it; some didn't. The world is made up of heroes and non-heroes. They are equally real. Go back, my son, to your real life and your real family, and
live!"

I felt so immediately lifted up by this clear solution to the problem of a lifetime that I became greedy. How is it that, with salvation in sight, we double our demands for entry?

"Of course, it was easier for Father, wasn't it?"

"What was easier?"

"Why, being brave. He was born brave, wasn't he? He never knew fear. And if you don't know what fear is, is it really so brave to face dragons? Mightn't one be like Siegfried and even like it?"

Mother became very grave at this. "Oh, my Ambrose, lay not that flattering unction to your soul! No one is born fearless. Your father made himself a hero by grit and will power. And don't you ever dare to take it from him!"

I bowed my head in bitter but accepting silence. It was not only myself that I should have to accept; it was she as well. The man she really admired, the man she would always admire, was Father. That was what I would have to live with: that I could never compete in a woman's eyes with a hero. Was I even sure that Ellen, deep down, didn't share that feeling? No, I was not sure.

W
HEN WALTER DIED,
shortly after the atomic bomb that ended World War II, in the terrible course of which his exhausting diplomatic missions to allied and neutral nations had fatally weakened his old heart, several publishers tried to interest me in writing a widow's account of our life in public affairs. But Walter had already published a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his career as a foreign affairs expert and roving ambassador, in the foreword to which he had, with his usual graciousness, acknowledged his "never-to-be-forgotten debt to a wife and partner whose value to me in my hours of toil and rest can never be adequately expressed." That is about all a consort of my era—and though I was a decade younger than Walter, I was born in 1880—can expect as a tribute to marital services that, like those of the bulk of my contemporaries, amounted to little more than a footnote to their husbands' careers. That is not to say that Walter Wheelock was not a perfect gentleman, a faithful and devoted spouse, one who encouraged me in all my interests and hobbies. It was just the way things were. I was always aware—and I am sure he was, though it was never mentioned—that the only real boost he got from me in his rise to the top was the money for which he had married me.

If I had had children, I wouldn't have written that. Why should I wish to hurt their feelings? But this memoir, which, if read at all, will be read posthumously in some historical archive, will have no value to anyone unless it is strictly true. So I may as well put it on the line, that it was widely accepted in my day, both here and abroad, that any ambitious and impecunious young man who elected to enter an unremunerative career, such as government, teaching, the armed forces or even the church, would do well to avail himself of a dowry. In Europe this was frankly spoken of as an accepted thing, but in New York, where persistent lip service was given—uptown, if not downtown—to romantic notions, it was distinctly muted. This was the cause of considerable confusion and much unhappiness to some of our young heiresses who wanted to be loved for themselves. In Europe they wanted only to be loved—it didn't so much matter for what. All I can say for myself is that I was a bit more of a realist than my sisters and cousins. At least I got a good man. Perhaps a great one.