Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

join us later in Nassau. On the deep blue sea amid the emerald isles I would have the opportunity to contemplate all the possible consequences of my persisting in such rash and disobedient conduct.
    I was in a desperately sullen mood during the cruise and would hardly exchange more than monosyllables with my family at meals. There were days when I declined to go ashore and would sit on the fantail with an unopened book in my lap. My reluctance to leave the ship, however, received Mama's support when she discovered that we were being followed by Sammy Thorn, Jr., in his beautiful sailing yacht, and that he had Miles Constable on board!
    This chase, if chase it was, was picked up by a society reporter, who wrote a lurid tale about it in a New York evening paper, which brought down upon us a series of irate cables from my furious sire at home. The reporter had great sport with his account of the two great pleasure crafts plying the waves of the Caribbean, carrying the pursuer Theseus and the pursued Ariadne. Mama at last expressed herself with a tight-lipped severity almost unknown to her usually bland and accommodating nature.
    "I'd rather see you in your grave than married to that man."
    And then our captain brought us an appalling wire from New York. Papa had died of a stroke.
    ***
    On the long trip home on
The Osprey
I remained most of the time shut up in my cabin, at first in a state of near shock. I had little doubt that Papa's stroke had in part been brought on by a fit of gargantuan rage at one of the saucier of those newspaper reports. If these were not directly attributable to my actions, they were indirectly so, and I had to face the grisly fact that I might have been guilty of a kind of patricide. I had also to face the bleak realization that, despite his sternness and irascibility, I had loved my father. And what was even harder to bear was my new strong feeling that he had loved me—that I had very likely been the only person in the world whom he
had
loved.
    Grandpa Thorn's favoritism may have been a kind of pose, the lovable old tycoon's fondness for a dear little girl, but Papa's was true. Oh, I could see that now! Mama had faintly bored him; Otto had alienated him; and my sisters' frivolity had exasperated him; but he had found me worthy of the brilliant life with Walter that he had so carefully and, I now supposed, lovingly planned. He had wanted me to have the success that he had never attained, which was why he had rejected Miles so fiercely and why he had retrieved Walter from his broken romance with Beatrice.
    When we arrived in New York, I saw Miles among the waiting crowd at the dock, but I wouldn't speak to him, nor would I see him when he called later at the house.
    After the long funeral and the sober sight of the big clan all in black, life for my mother and siblings began slowly to resume its normal course. Mama, for the rest of her long life, believed with me that Papa's demise had been caused by the newspapers, but I don't think she ever held it against me. He had been a mildly disturbing element in the placid silence of her card-playing, card-leaving existence. Serenity now could reign. Otto, deprived of his old grudge, had to content himself by muttering to me, "I don't know if there's a hell, but if there is, he's surely in it." And the effect of Papa's steely control of his female offspring was easily cast off by my sisters. I was the only member of the family, and certainly the only one of Grandpa's posterity, to be strongly affected.
    It was as if Papa had rung down a heavy curtain, like the big red one we faced at the opera, or the drab asbestos one that preceded it, on any future that I may have dreamed of having with Miles. I could not face the imagined prospect, no matter how fanciful or superstitious, of his rising from the dead—or from Otto's hell—to blast me for defying the prohibition for which, it gruesomely struck me, he had died to prescribe. I could not so turn him