Free The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss

know the literary tastes of old dowager ladies like myself, keeps sending me memoirs of the Mauve Decade, often written by persons I actually knew in that bygone era. Are readers today really interested in the idle doings of those obsessed hostesses, with their big pearls and big hats, their bigger villas and bigger parties? Oh, I know, I'm hardly one to talk. It's all very well for me to scoff at them now, but the glaring fact that I was an integral part of the whole silly game is flung in my face by the frequent appearance of my name in these very memoirs and the repeated likeness of myself in that celebrated photograph, crossing a lawn at a garden party in Newport, a thin maypole swathed in Irish lace with a long, plain face and a huge wide-brimmed black hat, "in full sail" as the phrase was, and accompanied by the short, dumpy figure of Mrs. Astor herself.
    Yet can't I make out—or is it part of a desperate self-delusion?—that there is something in that tall figure which in part redeems it from the pomposity of that gaudy age? Isn't there a hint that the woman it represents is turning herself into a deliberate caricature of the opulent grande dame who constituted the logo of the era? Isn't my hat too grotesquely large, my laciness overdone, my hauteur too pronounced? Isn't the mocking laughter that I liked to think of as always bubbling out of me showing a bit of its froth? After all, no one who knew those times can deny that I was known and even feared for my sharp tongue and dry oral portraits and that I was even dubbed the enfant terrible of Newport. Or was that, too, an act? Was my whole life an act, and perhaps, after all, not a very good one?
    I was certainly born for better things. My family was not nouveau riche, like the Vanderbilts and Goulds, but of old colonial stock. Our tree boasted eight passengers on the
Mayflower
and a signer, and my late lamented husband, Bayard Rives, was the son of a Rhode Island governor and the heir to a large textile fortune that had its respectable origin in New England mills long before the rise of the robber barons in railroads and steel. And before we inherited from his mother the grim old Rives "castle" that beetled over the sea in Newport by Fort Adams, we lived a more civilized life in Washington, where my husband occupied a minor but responsible position in the State Department and where we entertained at our lovely Greek Revival house in Georgetown such luminaries as the Henry Cabot Lodges, the John Hays, and Henry Adams himself. My portrait of those days, in which I am clad in a luscious gold evening gown, standing tall and haughty, presumably ready to receive distinguished guests, a fan clasped in one hand as if ready to strike the countenance of some unwarranted intruder, was considered one of the finest of Sargent's finest period and is now in the National Gallery.
    And yet. Must I not admit that if I try to glean an interesting insight from my photograph on the Newport lawn, I can also spot a hint of the future dowager in the hostess of an intellectual salon depicted by Sargent? And I have to concede that Henry Adams, on first viewing the oil, exclaimed with a hoot of laughter, "Sargent has done it at last! He has immortalized the wife of the goldbug!" The goldbug, of course, was his term for the species of male who, in his constantly reiterated opinion, had begrimed American culture.
    But I'm certainly not going to let the old cynic have the last word. He always professed to believe that women were the superior sex—in sensitivity and perceptiveness, anyway—and maintained that any astute observer would rather be ruled by Edith Roosevelt than Theodore and by Nanny Lodge than Cabot. He even went so far as to argue that the dullness of American history was accounted for by the scanty role it accorded to women, of which his own history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison is dry proof. But what I should have asked him is, how could the American