Free The Collected Stories of Louis Auchincloss by Louis Auchincloss Page B

her animosity I was not to learn until I came across her one hot August afternoon at the book counter of the stationery store, which was a meeting place second only in importance to the club. She was standing very stiffly but obviously intent upon the pages of a large volume of Dr. Fosdick. She looked up in some bewilderment when I greeted her.
    â€œI was just looking,” she said. “I don’t want anything, thank you.”
    I explained that I was not the clerk.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said without embarrassment. “I didn’t recognize you.”
    â€œWell, it’s been a long time,” I admitted. “I only come here for short visits.”
    â€œIt’s a very trivial life, I’m afraid.”
    â€œMine? I’m afraid so.”
    â€œNo,” she said severely and without apology. “The life up here.”
    â€œGreg seems to like it.”
    She looked at me for a moment. She did not smile.
    â€œThey’re killing him,” she said.
    I stared.
    â€œThey?”
    â€œThat wicked woman. And her associates.” She looked back at her book. “But I forgot. You’re of the new generation. My adjective was anachronistic.”
    â€œI liked it.”
    She looked back at me.
    â€œThen save him.”
    â€œBut, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested. “People don’t
save
people at Anchor Harbor.”
    â€œMore’s the pity,” she said dryly.
    I tried to minimize it.
    â€œGreg’s all right,” I murmured. “He’s having a good time.”
    She closed the book.
    â€œDrinking the way he does?”
    â€œDoes he drink?”
    â€œShockingly.”
    I shrugged my shoulders. When people like Mrs. Bakewell used the word it was hard to know if they meant an occasional cocktail or a life of confirmed dipsomania.
    â€œAnd that woman?” she persevered. “Do you approve of her?”
    â€œOh, Mrs. Bakewell,” I protested earnestly. “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong between him and Theodora.”
    She looked at me, I thought, with contempt.
    â€œI was thinking of their souls,” she said. “Good day, sir.”
    I discovered shortly after this awkward interchange that there was a justification in her remarks about Greg’s drinking. I went one day to a large garden party given by Mrs. Stone. All Anchor Harbor was there, old and young, and Theodora’s set, somewhat contemptuous of the throng and present, no doubt, only because of Theodora, who had an odd conventionality about attending family parties, were clustered in a group near the punch bowl and exploding periodically in loud laughs. They were not laughing, I should explain, at the rest of us, but at something white-flanneled and adipose in their midst, something with a blank face and strangely bleary eyes. It was Greg, of course, and he was telling them a story, stammering and repeating himself as he did so to the great enjoyment of the little group. It came over me gradually as I watched him that Mrs. Bakewell was right. They
were
killing him. Their laugher was as cold and their acclaim as temporary as that of any audience in the arena of Rome or Constantinople. They could clap hands and cheer, they could spoil their favorites, but they could turn their thumbs down, too, and could one doubt for a moment that at the first slight hint of deteriorating performance, they would? I felt a chill in my veins as their laughter came to me again across the lawn and as I caught sight of the small, spare, dignified figure of Greg’s mother standing on the porch with the Bishop and surveying the party with eyes that said nothing. If there were Romans to build fires,
there
was a martyr worthy of their sport. But Gregory. Our eyes suddenly met, and I thought I could see the appeal in them; I thought I could feel his plea for rescue flutter towards me in my isolation through the golden air of the peninsula. Was that why his mother had come? As I