Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page A

by the French analogy?"
    "In France a fallen woman may be ostracized by society but never by the family."
    "Elsa would point out that your wedding is going to be attended by several hundred people who are not family."
    "But we could
have
it just family."
    "With a million dollars' worth of wedding presents already received? Isn't that the figure the tabloids are quoting? If you think Elsa Carruthers is going to marry her daughter in some kind of hugger-mugger ceremony, you are dreaming."
    Griswold rose. "All I can do anyway is try."
    His father merely cackled.

    Griswold knew that his father was not exaggerating the formidable aspect of his mother-in-law-to-be. Priding himself on the cosmopolitan education that he had received on his "grand tour"—a whole year of London, Paris and Rome—he thought he could classify Mrs. Carruthers as a uniquely American type: the plain, stocky woman who, without any great pretensions of family or fortune (her father had been Commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard) had managed to capture the charming son of the richest man in New York. And it had all been done, too, so far as Griswold could make out, by force of character and the simple willingness to be disagreeable at the right moment. Of course Mr. Carruthers had not been faithful to his Elsa—even she could not ask for everything—but he had taken great, if unsuccessful, pains to conceal his infidelities.
    Elsa Carruthers had pale skin, flabby on the cheeks, a square chin, thin long lips, agate staring eyes and straight black-olive hair. She spent large sums on dress and on big jewelry, yet she wore it all carelessly, as if aware of not needing it for her real purpose, which was simply to dominate. Griswold, who liked to think he had an eye for a setting, would have dressed her in black, with a white collar, against a decor of dark sinister French Renaissance—a Catherine de' Medici—but she insisted instead on a totally inappropriate Louis XV background in vast chambers full of panels showing ladies in swings with lovers peeping.
    Today he found her and lone in the library where the presents were arranged on long trestle tables guarded by a detective. He might have imagined himself on the main floor of Tiffany's. lone, as radiant as one of the painted ladies in a swing, as fresh and dark-eyed as one of the Nattier portraits, managing to seem docile and obedient to her mother while at the same time conveying the idea that she could assert herself whenever she needed to, listened gravely as her betrothed explained his bizarre purpose to her parent.
    "But my precious Grissy," Mrs. Carruthers at last exclaimed with a dry, brittle laugh, "you must know that what you are proposing is quite out of the question. I suppose you are speaking, as the lawyers say, for the record. Very well, let us accept it as that and consider the matter closed. You are perfectly free to place the blame entirely on my shoulders. Tell Mrs. Norrie that you pleaded unsuccessfully for her invitation. She will understand." She turned now to the table nearest her. "Will you look at this magnificent parure from Ione's Aunt Natalie that has just arrived. Have you ever seen such rubies?"
    Ione took the necklace from the black box and held it to her throat as she whirled around her fiancé in a waltz.
    "Look, Gris! You're marrying a princess!"
    Griswold drew himself up, refusing to be distracted. "Please, Mrs. Carruthers! Please, lone! I must discuss this. It means so much to me."
    He had a distinct sense that lone was lost to the cause. The moment her mother had raised the flag of unity, she had bowed. The two ladies listened with unconcealed impatience while he again stated his case, in tedious detail. He was making no headway.
    "Look, Griswold," Elsa Carruthers stated at last in her firmest tone, which was very firm, "even if I were disposed to oblige you as a happy addition to my family, even if I sincerely wanted to do this favor for you, I could