Free A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth by Louis Auchincloss Page A

he assured me that I might survive just long enough to hear his mocking laugh.
    At Groton, the massive personality of Endicott Peabody, then in his late seventies and known as the Rector, dominated the campus. He had founded the school half a century before. My father and half the fathers of my classmates had been his students; they were as much in awe of him as we were. There was no appeal, at least in our minds, from his decrees. We came almost to identify him with the deity whom he so passionately and articulately adored. To doubt any article of his creed would seem an impertinence to an absolute authority.
    Ultimately I came to recognize that the rector had a benignant side, that his love of the school he had created was genuine, and that his concern reached out to every boy under his jurisdiction. Watching him praying strongly aloud in chapel, one noticed how his eyes sometimes closed, how his great body almost quivered with emotion. It was hard to believe that God did not hear him or carefully consider his positions. A species of minor but sentimental religious ecstasy was born in me at this period.
    I decided with the sanction (or was it the indifference?) of my parents to be confirmed into the Episcopal church, because, of course, the rector would do the confirming, and I attended his conferences on the subject where he gave to each boy present his unmistakable personal attention.
    Greedy to be singled out by the great man, I would ask questions in the answers to which I had no real interest, such as: Was it sanitary for so many to sip wine from the same communion cup? I simply wanted that large balding head turned in my direction and that intense gray-eyed stare fixed on my puny self as I heard the grave response: "Others have been concerned about that, my boy. You may have noticed that after each communicant has drunk I give the cup a strong wipe with my napkin."

    After my confirmation I remained a believer until my graduation from Groton. I had no trouble with the creed. I said my prayers at night, and I rose early to attend Holy Communion on Sundays, which was celebrated before the school breakfast. But one day a friend of mine, a deeply thoughtful Boston boy whom I much admired, Sam Shaw, suggested, as we happened to be walking past the then-empty chapel, that we enter and sit there for a bit. We did so for perhaps a quarter of an hour. When we came out, Sam said, "That was fine, wasn't it?" And it
had
been fine, though I knew that Sam embraced no religion whatsoever. Nor has he ever subsequently. Yet our little visit struck me then and still does as a deeply religious moment.
    Later I would return to the family Presbyterianism, but my faith was largely gone, and never really came back, even in some tight moments during the war. I came to share the amiable agnosticism of so many of my contemporaries and endeavored to live up to their moral code. I found the Christian sexual taboos unnecessary.
    I played for a time the sophomoric game of picking holes in the gospel, correcting the predictions and doubting the miracles, but ended by rejecting the virgin birth and settling for the theory, tacitly held, I believe, by millions of so-called Christians, that Jesus was simply a gifted mortal. I could never even give the church credit for good lives; it seemed to me that it valued faith above all, and I couldn't see why it was virtuous to believe in a god and sinful not to. I could quite see, however, why it was important for a church that we should.
    What I could never quite eliminate from my evaluations of the religions of the world was the death and mayhem that they had inflicted on people who questioned their creeds. It seems that as soon as the banner of a new faith has been firmly planted in converted soil, its priesthood invents savage punishment for heresy.
    It's all very well to argue that, at least in the case of the worshippers of Christ, physical retribution has been abolished, but it took force to make the