A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

gigantic hall to the shouts "Squad right!" or "Right by squadrons!" or "Squad left!" or "Left by squadrons!" In mock battle, where one was instructed to indicate that one was a casualty simply by lying down, I thought I should add a touch of drama by clutching my heart and reeling to the floor.
    This was followed by the reproof of a plumed cousin. Of course it was all play-acting seemingly frivolous when considered against the dark future of boarding school, which loomed like a black cloud on the immediate horizon. People would tell me, "You're just going to love Groton," but I didn't think they believed it themselves. And why did my older brother never warn me about it? It was, I thought, all part of a conspiracy as to how the world, the real world, was made to seem bearable to those about to enter it.

    If the Greys were a kind of benign microcosm of war, dancing school on Thursday afternoons in the ballroom of the Colony Club might be said to have been a similarly junior form of adult entertainment. Older people danced, yes, but certainly none I had seen in my limited travels moved in a fashion anywhere near what we were encouraged to adopt. Perhaps, though this was unlikely, none I knew had suffered under the dictatorship to minuet offered up by Mrs. Hubbell, a stiff, solid, silkily barked oak tree of a woman who was reputed to have instructed the princess royal of Britain in the art of Terpsichore.
    Awesome it was for a boy to be selected by that figure of robust carriage to be her partner in the demonstration of a step. Without fail one would be instructed, rather vigorously, to press a hand more firmly on that unslender, thickly corseted back. Could any male have ever clasped it in love? Perhaps not, though in a thunderous gale it might have offered safe and ample harbor. What a man Mr. Hubbell must have been! Never shall I forget how our venerable instructress, determined that her pupils be not behind in the latest craze, slowly and gravely bent her knees to illustrate the dip of the Charleston.
    But soon all commotion would end. All such activity was swept away by boarding school and Groton. When the sexes next met, it was in black pumps and formal dresses, in the uneasy shyness of the junior subscription dance, where, as one girl put it, even the ladies' room stank of fear. The battles of society start young.

6. My Life in Crime
    I WAS NINE YEARS OLD when I began a silent but rather dangerous form of what I suppose was rebellion. Or perhaps mere but short-lived insanity. I committed a series of larcenies. I had never stolen before and would, save for this brief interlude, never do so again. It was all quite curious, even to myself. It began with toys. The children of the summer people on Breezy Way in Lawrence, Long Island, with whom I played, had ample toys, and it was a simple matter for me, on occasion, to possess myself surreptitiously of an item coveted. But crime, like vermin, has the tendency toward rapid swelling, and I soon came to desire items of greater significance, including, alas, those belonging to adults. The most valuable of these that I can first recall was a pocket comb in a gold slipcase which I took from the bureau of a family weekend guest. Its loss was not discovered. And the streak continued.
    What were my feelings? Not ones of severe guilt, anyway. I knew of course that theft was wrong, even rather importantly wrong. But it didn't have any real existence to my twisted reckoning unless it was discovered; concealed it was nothing. Not the slightest communication could be risked, however, even with Tommy Curtis or Rivington Pyne, my two best and perhaps most similarly adventurous friends at Bovee. The precarious feeling of the adventure was entirely conditional; everything depended on my silence. And then, not long after the epoch-making theft of the comb, I was smitten with a new kind of violent temptation, far stronger than any I had felt for the rather junky items I had so far acquired and