The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss (31 page)

“Oh, I think I can promise you a Rhine maiden here and there, Aunt Rosalie,” Uncle Ed drawled in his easiest tone. “And we've installed some very curious machinery to make them appear to be swimming about under water. I think it might interest you to see it. Would you care to come down to the house one morning next week and let me show you?”

Uncle Ed could have his way with most women, even with Aunt Rosalie, but not when she was on the track of something. “It'll have to wait, I'm afraid, for I'm tied up all next week. But Harry and I would like very much to know what you're planning to tell your board when they find that all their lovely Traviatas and Aidas have been traded in for a parcel of shrieking Valkyries. Wouldn't we, Harry?”

“Very much, my dear.”

“Ah, but I'm all ready for the board, Uncle Harry, I assure you,” Uncle Ed exclaimed, turning deferentially to the old white-whiskered gentleman. “I have ordered a new dragon for
Siegfried
, and you can't even object to the expense, as I've raised the money myself. It is guaranteed to send shivers down the hardiest spine. Fire and smoke come out of its jaws, and its eyes goggle hideously. I predict that even you, Uncle Harry, won't sleep through that scene!”

Uncle Harry grunted, and I giggled and Mother smiled, but there was a distinct feeling at the table that Uncle Ed was going rather far. Granny did not attempt to conceal her apprehension.

“I don't think that's very polite to your uncle, Edmund,” she intervened, as if he were five and not forty-five. “After all, it was he who suggested your name originally to the board. He is going to bear the responsibility for what you do.
He
is going to be the one to face the boxholders!”

“I know that, Ma! I couldn't be more aware of it. But the day is also coming when Uncle Harry will be proud to have made me the manager. He will be known in musical history as the man responsible for the first all-star Wagner performances in this country!”

Uncle Harry looked so uncomfortable at this that even Aunt Rosalie saw that the conversation had better be changed, and we turned to the happier topic of who could be dropped that year from her ever-expanding Christmas party.

***

The struggle between Uncle Ed and the boxholders came to its crisis during a Monday night performance of
Tristan und Isolde
with the same cast that I had seen rehearsing it. I sat as usual on family parties in the front row of the Belknap box between Aunt Rosalie, who always occupied her special armchair on the left, and Granny. It was a trying seat, for I had to sit up as straight as they did. Aunt Rosalie even had a little cushion, as hard as a board, which hung down over the back rest to keep her from tilting. But what was far worse than the strain of the posture, at least to a music lover like myself, was the way, with a license as broad as their physical freedom was narrow, they exchanged comments about the opera across me in perfectly normal speaking tones.

In the second row were my parents and Miss Behn, one of those soft, chattering, semi-indigent old maids, always smiling, always looking to the “bright side” of their faintly illuminated existences, who attached themselves to the Aunt Rosalies of that era as pilot fish to sharks. And alone in a comer at the back of the box, a nodding Jupiter, Uncle Harry slept the sleep of the just fiduciary.

Why did they go to the opera? What took them,
every
Monday night, year in and year out? Could it have been only snobbery, as people believe today? I would be the last to deny that snobbery played its part, but it seems to me that there had to be something else, something deeper in the folkways of human communities. Monday night at the opera was like a village fair or a saint's festival. Society was still small enough so that one knew, if not everybody, at least who everybody was, and who were their guests and why. Many young people today do not know what this pleasure is. The impersonality of the modern city has destroyed it. But in New York you can still see a strange atavistic yearning for something not unlike it in the Easter Parade. What used to be a leisurely stroll of familiar figures in new finery down Fifth Avenue after church has become a turgid human river, overflowing the sidewalks and filling the thoroughfare to the elimination of all vehicles, a dense, slowly moving mass without origin or destination, drawn from the desolate suburbs, thousands upon thousands of women in silly hats, staring and being stared at, recognizing nobody and ignorant of why they are there, zombies seeking a lost ritual of community living that they will never find. Thank God my life has been largely lived in another day.

We arrived very late that night, to my distress but hardly to my surprise. Tristan and Isolde were already drinking the potion, and Granny and Aunt Rosalie were sufficiently diverted by the shouts of the sailor chorus so that no real ennui had settled in before the long entr'acte. In the second act, the love duet held everyone's attention, but trouble came, after the interruption of the lovers, with King Mark's long aria. The ripple of conversation through the boxes swelled to a gurgling stream.

I had done my homework on
Tristan
since the rehearsal, and I remember thinking that it was ironical that Granny and Aunt Rosalie's world should be most bored when Wagner was speaking most directly to them. For Mark sings of the day, which in
Tristan
is always compared unfavorably to the night. The day is reality: it is harsh and bright and garish. It is full of things that boxholders like to talk about: honor, loyalty, ties of blood. But the night, which to the lovers has become the only truth, is dark and lush and sleep-inducing. The night is death and love.

The chatter in the boxes reached a pitch that I had not heard before. It was actually difficult to catch some of Mark's notes. Suddenly, appallingly, silence fell with the unexpected downward swoop of the great curtains, the music stopped, and the lights went up. A tall bearded gentleman in white tie and tail coat strode quickly across the proscenium and faced the audience across the prompter's box. It was Uncle Ed. His high tense voice rang out in the auditorium.

“When the boxholders have concluded their conversations, the performance will be resumed. That is all. Thank you.”

And he walked offstage as rapidly as he had come on. There was a moment of shocked silence, then a buzz of startled whispers, then some whistles and finally the roar of resumed conversation and a stamping of feet. The boxholders consulted each other indignantly; there were shrill complaints and some laughs. From the galleries came catcalls that might have expressed anger at the interruption or approval of the management. One could not be sure of anything in the general confusion.

In the midst of it all Uncle Ed appeared again, but this time in the back of our box where he took a seat beside Uncle Harry, for once thoroughly awake. Uncle Ed tilted his chair back and crossed his arms over his chest in the gesture of one who was prepared to wait all night. In a minute the entire diamond horseshoe was aware of his presence there. The issue was joined.

I am sure that that was the most terrible moment of Granny's long life. I had heard of her near insanity at the early death of my apparently charming grandfather, and I was later to minister to her in her desolation at the death of each of her two sons. But there is a compensation in the very fullness of the tide of love that creates the agony of bereavement; there is the luxury of memory always open to us. No such leavening existed that night for Granny. She could not even console herself that her most beloved child was showing an admirable courage in his isolation. It is always difficult for the conventional to recognize courage in what they deem ridiculous causes. Here was Granny, surrounded by the only world that she knew and admired, in the very heart of it and at its dressiest moment, and having to behold it united in an anger and contempt, which to her, alas, was a
justifiable
anger and contempt, by the perverse, misguided son who sat behind her with folded arms and icy countenance, identifying her and her family and her sister with his foolish fads. It was as if a respectable Roman matron, on a holiday matinee at the Colosseum, should have had the shock of seeing a son leap into the arena to shield some dirty Christian from a hungry and deserving lion. Granny's discipline was of the tautest, but I could see her jaw tremble as it only did in moments of the very gravest tension. Then, without turning to me, she touched my elbow.

“Ask your uncle to have the performance resumed,” she murmured, as I leaned over to her. “Tell him I say: ‘please.'”

It was in our family a lady's SOS, the ultimate appeal. I stepped to the back of the box, terrified to think that the eyes of the multitude were upon me, and whispered the message hastily in his ear. He nodded gravely, and in the second that I caught his eyes I read in them all of his gallantry and all of his defeat. He rose and left the box, and in five more minutes the curtain rose again, before a still chattering house, on the garden by King Mark's castle. It was then that I grew up—in a single minute—and felt at last the full tragedy of what had happened.

***

Only two days later Father gave us the news at breakfast of Uncle Ed's resignation.

“I'm afraid it's a case of ‘I quit,' ‘You're fired,'” he said with a sad headshake. “He's going abroad almost at once. Your grandmother is terribly upset, Amy, and she finds it easier on her nerves not to be left alone with him. I think you'd better take the day off from school and spend it with her.”

“But why is it hard for her to be alone with Uncle Ed?”

Father and Mother exchanged glances, and then he abandoned the subterfuge. “Well, I guess you're old enough to hear about it. Your uncle has run up some very serious debts, and he will find it cheaper and more convenient to live in Germany while arrangements are being made about them. Your grandmother can't afford to dig any deeper into her capital than she's already done, and she's afraid that he will try to persuade her.”

I do not know if it was the restraint of my presence, but Uncle Ed certainly made no remark during lunch at Granny's that could even remotely be construed as referring to his financial exigency. Indeed, anyone watching the three of us in that dusky, silent dining room would have assumed that Granny was the one harassed by creditors. For all the reputed discipline of her generation, she made not the slightest effort at conversation, but simply sat there staring with tear-filled eyes at the errant son who was holding forth gracefully to me about the reasons for the popular failure of German opera.

“Haven't we heard enough about that sorry business?”

“Very well, Ma.”

“I don't see how you can be so cold, so casual.”

“I don't see how you can be so flurried, so emotional!”

“Edmund!” Granny cried. “I can't bear it! You know, my dear, that I would give you what you ask if it was fair to the others . . .”

“I know, Ma. Of course. Please! Remember Amy.”

After lunch, when Granny had gone to her room for a nap (nothing ever interrupted that), Uncle Ed followed me down to the hall and helped me into my coat. It was a long red coat with some twenty buttons down the front, and in my nervousness and distress, I buttoned one in the wrong hole. Uncle Ed turned me around to face him and carefully unbuttoned it to button it again properly.

“It doesn't matter,” I murmured. “I'm only going home, just a block.”

Uncle Ed raised a reproachful finger. “It always matters, Amy. Remember that. It
always
matters. Those are the only words of wisdom—the only assets, in fact—that your departing uncle leaves behind.”

And then, like Granny, I too broke down. I threw my arms around his neck and sobbed.

“Poor Amy,” he said, stroking my hair, “life is going to be hard on you, too. Just remember what I told you about the buttons. It doesn't sound like much, and it's
not
much, but it may be better than nothing. If it's all you've got.”

I ran out the door and down the stoop, and I never saw him again.

Three years later, when I was in Paris with Father and Mother, they went to see him at his hotel, but they would not let me go with them. By then he was intoxicated most of the time, and in a few more months his liver mercifully gave out.

My own story is only a sad postscript to Uncle Ed's. Without his example I might have faced the fact earlier that I did not have a voice for Wagnerian opera and reconciled myself to marriage and children. But the idea of a Stillman carrying on where he had failed became a fixation. I even believed that I owed it to him to sing the great roles as gloriously as he had dreamed of hearing them. Had Mother and Father ever divined this madness, they might have helped me, but it was part of my crazy integrity to tell them nothing.

After graduating from Brearley School, I refused adamantly to “come out,” and I opposed my mother and grandmother so violently in every other plan which they proposed for me, that Father, always the peacemaker, at last had to take charge of the situation. He decreed that I should be allowed to study the voice under professional auspices. Of course, it went without saying that I should continue to live at home, but I was permitted to spend my mornings in the studio of Madame Grisi-Helsinka, to be ostensibly trained to appear in benefit performances on the concert stage. Of course,
I
was determined that I would make my debut as Sieglinde, but there was no need to throw it in my family's face until the time arrived.