Free The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Page A

woman play any important part in the American dream if the American man slammed every important door in her face? In a country where the male devoted all his energy to business, from which the female was excluded except in degrading factory tasks or secretarial functions, what could the latter—at least the upper-class ones—do but grab hold of the one thing allowed them, which was, quite simply, the money? For the American male, unlike his sex the world over, was unique in caring more for the game than for its prize, more for the toil than for its profit. So long as he was allowed to spend his life in the office, his spouse could pretty well spend his dollars as she chose.
    Which, of course, explains the phenomenon of Newport, not only the watering place in Rhode Island but its lesser counterparts across the nation. Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, a recreated Catherine de Médici, was only the most conspicuous of the lavish female builders who covered our seaboard with derivative European palaces, packed closely together so each could envy the glories of the others. Even I, on a more modest scale, when my husband's health forced his retirement from government and we moved to New York, erected a gray French Renaissance chateau on a long narrow plot running down East Seventy-ninth Street, pushing its slender front onto proud Fifth Avenue. Ignorant souls criticized me for employing in the city a style supposedly designed for large domains of landscaped fields and forests. Had they never seen the urban mansion that the bourgeois Jacques Coeur placed in the very heart of fifteenth-century Bourges?
    "Society," as it then existed, was entirely the creation of women, and they clung to it, their one fief, with an understandable possessiveness, which is why they guarded it so fiercely from climbers, at least until those climbers had accepted their disciplines and code. The etiquette, the moral standards, the dress, the styles of living and entertaining were their exclusive prerogative, under rules rigidly enforced. The role of the husband and father was simply to pay. With Washington behind me and middle age reluctantly accepted, I looked about me for a new occupation and found only the social game sufficiently challenging. I didn't have anything like the fortune of the principal players, but I had enough to make a goodly show, and a show was all it was. My family offered no obstruction.
    My only daughter, Ethel, who prided herself on the modernity of her views and was always quoting Veblen, scorned such ambitions and had married a Stanford economics professor and moved to California, and my only son, Tim, a scholar, had become a dedicated archeologist and spent his share of the Rives fortune in distant digs. My husband, a quiet, gentle, intellectual man who tolerated most things and admired few, and who enjoyed frail health, simply smiled at my new project and told me, "Go to it, Kate! You have to work off some of that excess energy of yours. I'll pay the bills as long as I can and watch from the sidelines. But don't make me go to your parties."
    And indeed, after I had occupied and renovated the old Rives castle in Newport, he spent most of our summers on his yacht, resting his eyes on the eternal bobbing blue-gray of the ocean and no doubt considering me a silly ass.
    Newport, obviously, was my chosen battleground. Few observers have understood it as did the French novelist Paul Bourget, who in
Outre-Mer,
the account of his American travels, pointed out that it was entirely dominated by formidably respectable middle-aged or elderly females, the wives or widows of largely absent husbands, who had rid the summer colony not only of bohemian artists and writers but of anything remotely resembling a demimonde. The extra men at their parties were a dressy bunch, more or less epicene, and any husband who kept a secret mistress to entertain him on his rare visits to Aquidneck Island dared not lodge her any closer than Narragansett.
    Mrs.