Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

that nobody, including me, ever really got to know him, ever fathomed the depths of his arcane personality. The almost impenetrable personality he turned to the world and, with only a few changes, to his immediate circle was a gracious but formal one: that of a tall, slender, handsome man, with a strong chin, a commanding nose, piercing eyes and a high clear forehead reaching up to a balding yet noble scalp. But if he was gracious to the world, it was also apparent that he expected to conquer it.
    Papa had told me his history The offspring of two old but impecunious Manhattan families, he had been raised by a widowed mother who had denied herself every luxury in order to give him the best of schooling, clothes and travel. And he had rewarded her every expectation: leading his class at Yale, being "tapped" for the prestigious secret society, Skull & Bones, writing a best seller on the history of the Monroe Doctrine at twenty-five, and having now earned, still in his early thirties, the reputation of being one of the brightest and most coming young men in the State Department. Papa admitted to only a single check in Walter's rising career: that of being rejected as a suitor for the hand of my cousin Beatrice Thorn, the great heiress of the family, by her father on the grounds that he was a fortune hunter. Papa's low opinion of Uncle Sam Thorn had dropped even lower when he learned of this.
    "Your brother is an even greater ass than I suspected," he fumed to my placid and indifferent mother at the breakfast table. "He cannot see the difference between a man who seeks a solid financial basis for a career that may lead to his being Secretary of State and one who is looking for money to keep himself in racehorses and mistresses."
    Yet Walter must have been enough of a realist to revise downward the estimate of his financial requirements, for he evidently saw no objection to my less brilliant expectations. And I can certainly assert that from the very beginning of his attentions to me, when he assumed the infelicitous role of suitor into which my father, with his customary absence of any concession to subtlety, had thrust him, he tactfully refrained from all adulatory compliments or factitiously romantic phrases. He could, by his easy, cool manners, have been an old family friend or a relative, a pleasant bridge between the generations (he was halfway between Mama's age and mine) and a gentleman who did not consider a lady his conversational inferior. I can see in retrospect that there may have been a shrewd design in his letting me see him as the precise opposite of Miles (whose name he never mentioned), as a man, in short, who sought to reorganize the world rather than sneer at it, and as a guide to fit a woman into the new creation rather than fly with her out of it to some never-never land. And he did succeed in weakening my prejudice against him as a paternal candidate; I came to accept him, not certainly as a lover, but as a new friend.
    Walter's views on the role of women in our society were considerably more liberal than those of my father and uncles. While he did not rule out a future for us in the professions or in business, he believed that at present our best hope was to be the wives and helpmates of important men.
    "There's no point in getting too far ahead of the times," he told me. "If I were a woman, I'd want to marry a man whose career I could share. It wouldn't be a businessman. What role is there for a Mrs. Rockefeller or a Mrs. Carnegie to play, in oil or in steel? But in politics and diplomacy, the husband and wife can be almost equal partners. That is something some of our First Ambassadresses have learned better than some of our First Ladies."
    This faintly irritated me. It was too much of his plan to show me all I could do for
him,
and it gave me the nerve to twit him with the rumored engagement of his former inamorata.
    "Well, at least we know one kind of marriage that is a true partnership," I affirmed. "My