Free Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss Page A

sir?"
    "Well, you see, David, Jowett was writing for an English nineteenth-century audience. They would not have understood that kind of attachment between two men. So he deemed it better to make it between a man and a woman."
    "But that doesn't make sense, sir! You told me that Plato was talking about friendship. About 'platonic' love. Wouldn't his contemporaries have been more ready to believe in a nonphysical relationship between two men than in such a one between a man and a woman? Didn't he make it harder to understand by changing the gender?"
    "Plato maintained that the highest form of love was nonphysical. A friendship—perhaps what one might call a romantic friendship—between two men was the highest of all. But there were friendships in his day between men that were not platonic. That was something that troubled Plato less than it troubled the Victorians."
    "Does it trouble you, sir?"
    "What do you mean, David?"
    "That two men should have such a friendship?"
    "Such a relationship is not part of our culture. Or admitted by our religion."
    "But we admire the Greeks so, sir!
You
admire them, certainly. How can you admire a people who did things of which you disapprove?"
    "We live in different times, David."
    "Do we, sir?"
    "And now, I think the subject had better be closed."
    "Oh, Mr. Sumner! I thought you were the one man in Clare I could talk to!"
    But Marcus was not touched by this appeal. Indeed, he was very much relieved that David's graduation was so near at hand. He discontinued his individual instruction of the boy and told the headmaster that he had grave misgivings about his future.
    Mr. Forrester, now in his sixties but as vigorous as ever, glanced down at the little man, who was walking as rapidly as he could to keep up with him. They were on their way to morning chapel.
    "But the boy's a near genius, I thought you told me, Marcus. Why won't he go far?"
    "I was thinking of his morals."
    "Well, he'll have problems, of course. Perhaps he will find a milieu where people like that are accepted."
    Marcus put his hand on Forrester's arm to support himself after this shock. "You mean you know?"
    "I don't know that there's anything to
know.
As yet. And let us devoutly hope there won't be till he's out of Clare. But a headmaster learns to recognize certain types."
    "You mean you can spot something like that and not move to stamp it out?"
    "Oh, my dear Marcus, what powers you ascribe to a headmaster!"
    "But don't you even
want
to put it down?"
    "I didn't make the world. There are things in it that it is better we should accept."
    "I don't agree!"
    "Didn't you learn acceptance when
you
were young?"
    "What do you mean, sir?" Marcus could hardly credit his hearing.
    "Don't you know what I mean, Marcus?"
    Marcus stopped and let the headmaster go on to chapel where he would start the service. He stared ahead at the great craggy tower shooting up into a soft, clouded, indifferent sky, a phallus thrusting into a universe that did not care, discriminate or fear. Beauty fell about his feet in a thousand fragments as if the west window that he had commissioned had shivered and been blown all over the campus.
    The next day he again resigned from Clare. He reoccupied his old house and lived there henceforth alone.

The Shells of Horace
    B EING PRESIDENT of the commuters' club car operating between Brewster and Grand Central Station was just the kind of thankless job with which Horace Devoe was always finding himself stuck. Because he did not have to work and commuted only in the spring and summer from his Palladian villa and five hundred acres of landscaped forest and meadows in Katonah to the bare, austere office on Vanderbilt Avenue where, with the faithful Mrs. Sprit, he clipped his coupons and paid his taxes, it was assumed by his year-round neighbors that he had all the time in the world to spare. "Oh, if he wants to pretend he's working," he could almost hear them say, "we'll see he has something to do!" And