The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online Page B

he’s a bore about his cases. And Eliot flees bores as he would the plague. He may be a genius, but he’s a brutally intolerant one.”
    â€œBut, as you say, he likes to surprise people. Eliot can’t bear being taken for granted. He’ll always contradict you. Tell him someone’s a bore, and he’ll call him a wit. A wit whom only someone as perceptive as Eliot can see. Tell him someone’s a genius, and he’ll call him an ass!”
    â€œTo prove you an ass. Yes, I see that. But this thing with Tommy seems a bit of a muchness.”
    â€œHasn’t Eliot been using Tommy to help him on some legal problem?”
    â€œTrue. But since when did Eliot choose his friends from among his hirelings?”
    Well, that was it. I wouldn’t admit it to Letty for the world, but I was troubled. I had never made it a secret to myself that I disliked Eliot Amory. He simply possessed too many assets. His blond good looks, his straight, slim, sturdy build, the amiable charm of his glowing good manners, the small, intimate smile that seemed to initiate you into the inner circle of those who really knew what it was all about, the seeming effordessness of his brilliant solution to every offered problem, all enhanced the portrait of a man with spectacular gifts. Why did I smell an arch ego behind his masterful manipulation of his wife’s enterprises? Wasn’t it rather mean of me to feel that only condescension lay behind his genial acceptance of his wife’s old English teacher? But there you are. I did.
    I now began to track the developing intimacy between Eliot and Tommy. It was true, of course, that Eliot had retained Tommy as counsel to the
New Orange Review,
which certainly necessitated a number of meetings, but why did they have to take place at the Newbolds’ apartment?
    The Newbolds’ baby, Stephen, of whom Eliot seemed inordinately fond, was naturally his godson and the brightest and most beautiful child anyone had ever seen, but Eliot had never been a noticeably paternal type with his own two children, both daughters, and had seemed quite content with the somewhat perfunctory colloquy that he accorded the girls when the nurse brought them in for a short visit on his evening return from the office. Indeed, Letty had once confessed to me that she feared her failure to produce a son had deeply disappointed him and that she bitterly deplored the ovarian disorder that had caused her doctor to prohibit any try for a third child. Of course, she had quickly added that Eliot had never expressed a word of his regret. Like his recurrent fits of depression, he kept it to himself. The Eliot the world saw was always a cheerful one.
    The crisis, as it was for me, anyway, came after a dinner at Alfreda’s—just the two of us, Tommy being in Albany arguing a case—when she brought me a cognac and closed the door to the library to which we had withdrawn.
    â€œYou and I know each other so well, Hubert, that I can skip the prologue,” she began. “I know what you have guessed, and I’ve known it for some time.”
    â€œWhat have I guessed?” I asked with a sinking heart.
    â€œThat my Stephen is Eliot’s son.”
    I gasped as if I had been thrown into churning waters.
    â€œIf that is so,” I finally was able to retort, “what business is it of mine? Isn’t it a matter between you and Tommy and Eliot alone? If Tommy consented to such an arrangement, mustn’t it be kept the darkest of secrets? For I can’t imagine that Letty knew! Mind you, I’m not criticizing you or Tommy. It may even have been, on his part, an example of his magnanimous love for you. But it must never be spoken of!”
    â€œBut Tommy would never have consented to such a thing.” Alfreda’s small smile seemed directed at my naivete. “He may be brought to accept it after the fact—he might even be glad to have a distinguished father for the