Free Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss

himself and that my reaching for the excuse of a breach of law, which would have never been discovered or, if it had, probably been condoned, was a mere blind to hide my jealousy and resentment of my popular and beloved sibling. And they may have been right, too, in the funny way that people have of being right when they attribute nasty motives to one. For had I not been sure that Harry would reject my offer to save him, and didn't that give me the excuse I may have consciously or unconsciously needed to throw him to the dogs?
    When Harry's term was over, after only sixteen months because of model prison behavior, he was greeted at his club with a huge and hearty "coming-out" party, to which I was not invited. But, as I have said, people don't laugh at me anymore. And that's something.

Entre Deux Guerres

The Marriage Broker
    T HE THING THAT intrigues me most about my mother-in-law's family—almost as much as it irritates me, but never quite, oh no!—is the way they silently, and yet so audibly, disapprove of what they reluctantly concede to be my charm, a quality notably lacking in all of them, with the exception of my husband and two children, and at the same time expect me to use this sole asset of mine (if such it be) to pull them out of the social and financial holes into which they ever more deeply sink. And there we were, in 1937, the year of which I am writing, incurably wed to our expensive tastes and just as incurably lacking what used to be a moderately comfortable little family fortune.
    Grinnell Scott, my lord but no longer my master (I have had to take up the reins of management), may still be one of the most beloved and popular sportsmen on the Northeastern Seaboard, a long-term president of the New York Golf and Tennis Club and a squash racquets champion at age fifty-five. But with a genial smile and shrug of his shoulders he leaves all business matters to me, droning, in his pleasant whine, "But, Katie, sweet, you always got high school marks, and you know I could never add two and two." Well, I've done my best, but I can't perform the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and I've had to rent our house in Manhattan and park my little family the year round in our shingle villa in Bar Harbor, inadequately heated for a Maine winter, where we can gaze out the windows at the cold gray Atlantic and envy our departed summer neighbors, tucked away cozily in their southern homes.
    But I must say about Grinnell and the children that although they left the decisions to me, they never complained. Grinnell insisted that cross-country skiing, which he can do in Maine, was the sport in which he had always wished to indulge, and the twins, Elfrida and Damon, now thirty and cheerfully unemployed, were equally content, Elfrida with her watercolors and Damon with the opportunity to get on with that novel he was always going to write.
    My mother-in-law, typically, managed to keep her New York apartment open so that she was spared the rigor of Maine winters. Much later, on her demise, we learned that she had done it by spending all the capital that might have come to my children. Really, she and Grinnell's maiden sisters were incomparable. Serene in their smugness and fatuity, confident that their Colonial blood was envied by all (actually, my family was much better) and proud of what they called the Scott "pluck" (they would pale at the sight of a cockroach), they counted on me to ingratiate myself with the new rich of Bar Harbor, when summer came, and marry off Elfrida and Damon to advantage. But would they help? Heavens, no! They would not lower themselves to meet the newcomers and did not hesitate to look down on me for being able to do the job on which they counted but the mechanics of which they despised—and congratulated themselves for despising! For would a lady, a real lady, care as I had to care about clothes and looks and ingratiating manners? Of course not!
    And I must admit that they are not wholly