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

churches agree, and they have retained the concept of hell to let them perpetrate in the hereafter what they can no longer accomplish on earth.
    I recall a performance of Verdi's
Don Carlos
at the Metropolitan Opera where the auto-da-fe scene was brilliantly and effectively staged. The condemned heretics marched glumly across the stage toward the explosion of light in the wings representing the fire that awaited them. Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce, famous Catholic convert, in the box next to mine audibly protested. I had the impression that it was the representation of the past rather than its condemnation that really upset her.

    How far back in the past was burning still an acceptable form of execution in supposedly civilized countries? I believe a woman was burned alive for the murder of her husband in England in one of the first years of the nineteenth century. And it is possible to put ourselves in the mind of long-dead people who, with perfect complacency, did things of hideous cruelty, if those things happen to be described by a vivid and sympathetic writer.
    Take Madame de Sevigne, for example, who wrote such copious letters to her beloved daughter. It is hard not to love a woman so kind, so witty, so seemingly humane and sensible, so like the finest women of our own day. But what is this that we encounter? The marquise is going along with a family plan to enhance her grandson's inheritance and his chance for an advantageous matrimonial match by transferring his sister's dowry to him and locking up for life the poor little robbed thing in a convent!
    "Oh, she will be quite comfortable there," the grandmother coolly opines. "The abbess is her aunt." "On est la niece de Madame!"
    ***
    Saying all this brings me to the question of what influence Christianity had on my contemporaries at Groton and later. I don't think very much. Few as adults even attended divine services, and only two became priests. We heard, it was true, of a devout group of boys at Saint Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and one who became a Trappist monk, but this was rare. Was the Ivy League of my day then a godless one? Perhaps so, but it certainly did not lack ideals.
    I used to say to my father: "If my classmates should ever run this country all would be well." The irony of my life is that they did indeed have a hand in it. And every one of them was a fervent backer of the war in Vietnam.

10. The Great Depression
    M Y SIX YEARS at Groton, 1930–1935, coincided closely with those of the Great Depression, but the Great Crash of 1929, which devastated our world, affected my family little, though we had reason to regret the move we had just made to a splendid penthouse on the highest point of Park Avenue. I was completely absorbed by boarding school and essentially unaware of the outside world until I had to go home to have my tonsils out. I needed a tutor to make up for lost school time, and Mother asked me if there was anyone from the old Bovee faculty I would like. The school was terminated; the teachers were all out of work.
    "Oh, I'd love Mr. Evans, but you'd never get him."
    "Oh, I think I might."
    And poor, dear Mr. Evans duly appeared, looking sad and gaunt. Mother, leaving for her day, told me to be sure to ask him to stay for lunch. I forgot, and when she returned and found him gone she was irritated.
    "Why was it so important?" I wanted to know.
    "Because he's hungry!"
    ***
    During these difficult times, Father remained a member of the Davis Polk firm, and there was always an income to be gleaned from the financing and reorganization of the great corporations it represented. When things were so bad that the older members had to reduce their percentages of the take, they would do as John Davis instructed them. He would take each older partner aside and say, if to Father, "Howland, we old farts have to move over a bit."
    Sometimes, as Father put it, when the figures came out, it would be apparent that only one old fart had moved over, but