Free False Gods by Louis Auchincloss

mind of a handsome painted puppet released from his strings and cavorting about the stage on his own. It may have seemed to him that he had spent his life adjusting himself to the role in which he deemed his family to have cast him: the freckled kid in knickers, with hair either too slickly brushed or hopelessly messy, whom his elders liked smilingly to call "incorrigible," but whose harmless mischievousness and sound healthy appetites could be counted on to guard him from the vices that peculiarly infected an American Eden.
    He may even have apprehended that only by preserving such an image could he be forgiven the good looks and boyish charm that his mother seemed almost to deprecate, as if he had manifested a kind of hubris in offering so unflattering a contrast to his fatuous older brother and his squealing sisters. For if his family depended on him, so to speak, to reconcile them with the brownstone community of Manhattan, if without him to dress up the background his father might have seemed a pompous nincompoop and his mother a complaining valetudinarian, it was in no way to Horace's credit, but simply the evidence of a duty imposed on him by an arcane power which would promptly expose him as the lowest of frauds should he forget for a minute the lines of his given part.
    I can go even further, now that I am launched in Freudian reminiscence. I venture to perceive in the very arrangement of the floors of the Aspinwalls' brownstone the scaffold that upheld and supported Horace's neurosis. Such small distinction as this edifice could boast diminished as you rose on the high straight stairs, and when you reached the fourth floor with Horace's and his sisters' rooms (the five maids huddled in cubicles above), you were faced with the plainest of brown wood factory-made furniture and walls adorned with cheap prints of academic paintings. What, however, particularly marked the junior status of this level was that whereas on the floor below each of Horace's parents and their older son enjoyed a separate bathroom, the fourth story was equipped with but a single water closet, though its availability for all of the younger Aspinwalls seemed curiously indicated by its possession of three doors. It was the modest, even the prudish habit of Horace's sisters to lock all three portals when they were using the plumbing, but when they exited they would invariably unlatch only one. Horace therefore might have to try two doors unsuccessfully before gaining access, and when either Chattie or Lizzie was actually within she would never give him warning by singing out "Someone's in here!" but wait until he had assailed the locked third and then shout a triumphant, "Yenh, yenh!"
    It may sound fanciful, but I suggest that Horace's association of himself with the two female co-tenants of the water closet had some relation to his earlier sense of unworthiness in respect to Dorothy. He may have come to regard that mocking cry from behind the trio of locked doors, followed soon by a vulgar cascade, as a brutal association of sex with excretion in which he and his silly sisters were irretrievably caught, whereas his father and brother below, real men, performing their natural functions in dignified and unintruded-upon silence, reserved their genital energy for females whom it could only awe.
    Anyway, that family must have done
something
to him!
    ***
    I speak with some inevitable hindsight when I describe the
dramatis personae
of my life, but I think it is true to say that from my first serious conversation with Frank Stonor I had spotted him as a man dominated by a single passion: the need to impress a world that he despised. Seated in a black carved Elizabethan armchair before a blazing fire in the immense log-walled hall of his Adirondacks "cabin," under the severed heads of bear, moose, and elk, the highest hanging thirty feet above him, his affectation of formal attire in the wilderness, even to a high collar and scarlet tie (though there might