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

Winthrop Chanler, in her memoirs
Roman Spring,
related that the so-called four hundred would have fled in a body from a poet, a painter, a musician, or a clever Frenchman, and she described well its organizer and acknowledged leader, Mrs. Astor: "She always sat on the right of the host when she went out to dinner parties; she wore a black wig and a great many jewels; she had pleasant cordial manners and unaffectedly enjoyed her undisputed position."
    Yet it was from the side of this great matron that I seduced the young or youngish man who became what he himself liked to term my major-domo and court jester. Beverly Dean, despite his long and rather messy blond hair, his mocking blue eyes, and his screeching laugh, might have struck an observer as a regular and even almost sturdy American youth had not his habit of overgesticulating and nervously twisting his shoulders and torso seemed to indicate that he was warning one against any overestimate of his masculinity and strength. He had wit and impudence and a species of charm, no known occupation or source of income or even family, and he was a fixture at every party. He was generally supposed to be trying to occupy in Mrs. Astor's court the place of her late guide and mentor, Ward McAllister.
    The conversation that led to his brief reign over my equally brief social endeavors occurred after a dinner party at Alice Vanderbilt's Genovese palazzo, The Breakers, when he and I were sitting in a far corner of the vast marble hall to which we had retreated so that we might chat without disturbing those guests who were listening to a rather mediocre string quartet.
    "Our hosts have certainly made the grade," I commented drily, glancing toward the crowded and respectfully listening audience in the parlor. "But then there is really no resisting the Vanderbilts. Such a numerous clan, and each member richer than the one before. And actually quite amiable, too. And handsome, unlike the Astors, who are so plain. Yesterday there was no knowing them, and today you can hardly tell a Vanderbilt from a Van Rensselaer. But where, after all, have they got to? Now they're as dull as the rest of us."
    "Nobody had called
you
dull, dear lady."
    "Not to my face, anyway, and God knows, you're all welcome to my back. But what in the name of Lars Porsena and his nine gods have we or the Vanderbilts gained, my dear Beverly, by housing ourselves in the borrowed glory of the Italian Renaissance? Think of what the marble walls of a palazzo like this would have witnessed in the days of the Borgias! Murder and poison, no doubt, but also passion and great art! And what do they see today but a bunch of overdressed old women lost in a snowstorm of cards, both playing and calling?"
    "Write up that onslaught, will you please? It should make your name in belles lettres." And he crushed my incipient retort with his high cackle of a laugh.
    "But seriously, Bev, what is it that gives Newport its peculiar deadness? For some of the architecture is not so bad, really, and the air and sea are delightful. Not to mention the matchless gardens. Why do I want to scream?"
    Beverly resorted to his favorite nickname for me. "It's just your good taste, Lady Kate. You see the summer colony as a farce. It has nothing to do with what is really going on in America. Tiaras and porte-cocheres. Emblems of royalty. It's a court without a sovereign, a religion without a deity, a ritual without a cause. At fancy dress balls how do the guests dress up? As kings and queens! As Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette!"
    "You mean they lose their heads?"
    "But not their headdresses."
    "Yet isn't that the way with fancy dress the world over? You remember all those pictures of the British peerage at the famous Devonshire Ball? They all came that way."
    "True. For the Brits suffer from the same disease. Their lords and ladies try to kid themselves into believing they have some of their old power left by strutting about a ballroom in the glad rags of the