The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Read Free Book Online

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    Meadowview, I must here point out, occupied a central position in the mind, or perhaps I should say the imagination, of my patient. Marvin adored the place and knew every one of its thousand acres. On vacations from school, and later from Yale, he would insist on staying there even when his parents and sisters were residing in the city, happily living alone in the great empty house, deserted by all but the silent old caretaker and his silent spouse. He would wander over the fields and through the woods, across meadows where the herd of Black Angus grazed or over the flagstoned paths of his mother's wonderful gardens, or he would sit and muse in the little porticoed Greek temple that she had had constructed on top of a small hill commanding four views down grass paths lined with statues of gods and goddesses. From there he could see the long soft-red brick façade of the two-story mansion, which seemed to melt into the countryside, the work of an expert landscape gardener who had blended to perfection the things of man—house, farm, stable, outbuildings, even the ancient windmill in the distance—with the things of nature.
    However much it was his life, Meadowview, of course, was a shrine to his mother's beauty. It seemed to him that her spirit permanently inhabited the Greek temple, silently and benignly present, worshipped by all who approached. Her actual appearance at Meadowview struck him at times as faintly out of key, for she moved briskly about the grounds, checking efficiently but smilingly on this and that, uttering her gendy phrased but perceptive criticisms to gardeners or farm workers who obviously adored her. And she was always adequately terrestrial with her adoring son.
    "Sometimes, child, I think you're a little too fond of this place," she would tell him. "You're missing out on the subscription dances in town I've signed you up for. You must learn to pay more attention to social life."
    To some extent, however, he was doing that. At least in school. He was finding friends there. He had now attracted the attention of some of the leaders of his class. Few of the boys had as yet become worldly or socially snobbish, but there were those who had been impressed by the long yellow rattling Hispano-Suiza town car and its scarlet liveried chauffeur when it had borne Lila Daly on one of her weekend visits to the school. By the time Marvin was fifteen, the gray Gothic buildings of St. Luke's and the heavy rounded arches of its Romanesque chapel had begun to lose some of their grimness, and the red and golden glory of a New England autumn had bathed the campus in a new and softer light. He had begun to relish Keats and Shelley and was learning "La cathédrale engloutie" in his piano lessons.
    It was at this time that he first fell in love. Billy Lansdorf was a seemingly shy and reticent boy with dark, rather sultry good looks. Actually, as Marvin was later to discover, Billy was anxious to join the popular group of the class leaders, but he didn't know how best to put himself forward. He had noted the Hispano-Suiza and learned that Marvin's grandfather had been one of the "lords of Pittsburgh," and as he was a scholarship student whose family had lost everything in the great market crash, he had begun to regard Marvin as possibly just the social asset that he needed. Finding that his overtures of friendship were readily, even gladly, received, he was soon Marvin's daily companion, taking long walks with him in the countryside and patiently listening to his enthusiastic chatter about music and poetry. It was particularly agreeable to Billy to find that his new pal was eager to have him visit in the approaching summer at the Dalys' famous estate on Long Island, a welcome alternative to the exiguous Lansdorf family flat in Brooklyn.
    To Marvin the friendship was a very different affair. It simply illuminated his life. His attraction to Billy, which had preceded the latter's interest in himself and consisted