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The
Scarlet Letters by Louis Auchincloss Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Puritan Prolific
Auchincloss, who has captured Manhattan life
perfectly in many prior works, transports the interpersonal dynamics of
Hawthorne’s puritan tale into 1950s New York city in a new novel, The
Scarlet Letters. On these pages, the tightness of the social order
becomes sharp, loyalties are complicated, and power and passion meld. Auchincloss presents memorable characters, a fast moving
plot, and an intelligent approach to writing that keeps thoughtful readers
engaged. Here’s an excerpt of chapter 5 (pp. 68-78): What
was perplexing to Vinnie was in how many ways Rod
was the perfect spouse. That many of her girlfriends envied her she did not
doubt. Not only was he a fine-looking and well-mannered man; she sensed that
they presumed him to be a vigorous lover. And he was, though he went at it
almost as if it were a regular and healthful calisthenic.
He was definitely not open to imaginative variations of the act of coition,
and the one time she had suggested a ritual described graphically to her by a
girlfriend over a beach club sandwich, he had been distinctly shocked. After
that she refrained from any further such suggestions and sought to content
herself with the supple if habitual movements of his elegant body. How many
women, after all, she would ask herself, had anything half as good as that? And
what was more, he was an easy man to live with. He
was consistently good tempered, even when in the throes of a grinding
securities case, and on the rare occasions when his mood darkened, he was considerately
silent. He never reproached her for anything she did or failed to do. If
something went wrong his rebuke was confined to a calm and reasonable
suggestion of how it could be remedied. The children adored him, and no
matter how many nights in the week he toiled at the office, a good part of
every weekend was kept rigorously free to teach the girls tennis or take them
sailing or, if it was raining, to a movie. He was a good host at their
occasional Saturday night dinner parties, mixing drinks for all and never
overindulging himself, looking after the shyer or less popular guests,
showing a friendly interest in the pleasures or problems of all. About
herself and her own interests he was scrupulously careful to make inquiries
as soon as he came home from the office. He interested himself in the
fund-raising drives that she instituted for her settlement house and school,
and offered her the names of clients to whom she might make an appeal. If it
seemed to her that he was not deeply concerned with such matters, but lent a
hand and ear solely because they were hers, was she not honest enough to
admit that her own concern with them was not much greater? Even if she should
raise enough money to allow the settlement house to divert and edify its
whole neighborhood, or the school to endow chairs for the finest teachers and
provide scholarships for all its needy students, would she enjoy a fraction
of the high elation with which Rod approached each new law problem presented
by a client? No! When she complained of this to her mother, for whose wisdom
she sometimes hankered even as she feared its acidity, she found cold comfort
indeed. “If
you want the thrill that men like your father and Rod get out of their
profession, you have to go whole hog, my dear. That’s what you and so many of
your friends have yet to learn. The job must come first.” “You
mean ahead of one’s husband and children?” “Oh
yes. It might be better not to marry at all.” “Mother!
You think I’d be happier if I’d been a lawyer?” “Definitely.
Or a dentist. Even an undertaker.” “And
an old maid, to boot?” “I don’t know how you define an old maid.
You could still have love affairs. Only they’d have to come second. The Way
they do with men. The best men.” The
way they do with men! The words stuck in Vinnie’s
head. Was that true of all love? Even of Rod’s? She was sure, if ever he were
faced with having to make the unimaginable choice between herself and his law
firm, that he would choose her. But would that
really be love? Wouldn’t it rather be duty? She knew, of course, that he
could love, in his way, but wasn’t duty the stronger force in him? Ah, that
was the thing she didn’t know about him, the inner Rod that had always eluded
her, that eluded, she supposed, everybody, even her father. There was
something that he grasped tightly to himself, guarding it, perhaps even
unconsciously, from the whole world. Where
help came to her, if help it was, was from Harry Hammersly.
He and Rod seemed to represent the attraction of opposites. Friends in
college and law school and now law partners, they always remained in constant
touch with each other. Yet Harry, a merry bachelor, was as mocking and
impudent and charming as his pal was sober, polite and at times a bit grim.
And if he made fun of the world, he made particular fun of Rod. Rod
ordinarily did not appear to mind it, though he sometimes got a bit hot under
the collar when Harry questioned the motives behind any legal position taken
by the firm. On the whole, however, Harry, like a fool in a medieval court,
was licensed, at least in Rod’s domain, to say what he liked. Vinnie had originally supposed that she
should disapprove of Harry. His impudence verged on heresy, and he laughed at
too many sacred things. But his apparent assumption that her wit and wide
views lifted her to the level of isolated liberty, making them lonely
partners in a world of amiable philistines whom it was their duty to
entertain, was flattering. And his well-made but soft body, which she had
initially found faintly repellent, even effeminate, she was bothered to find
increasingly intriguing to her. The sensuous way he twisted his torso,
particularly after making an off-color joke, she reluctantly admitted,
titillated her. And in his rare moments of repose, as when he was listening
to her — and a very attentive listener he could be — his almost handsome
Roman face waxed almost noble, though he soon enough shattered the impression
with his high screeching laugh, as though otherwise some deed of heroism
might be horridly expected of him. At
length she began to suspect that there was something subtly undermining in
the persistence of his jokes at her husband’s expense. And that there might
be something disturbing in her own acceptance of
these. One
Sunday afternoon in Glenville, when the three of them were seated on the
terrace by her father’s tennis court after a game of singles between Rod and
Harry, which Rod, of course, had won, the conversation fell on the trial of a
famous gangster who was, surprisingly, represented by a respectable law firm.
Vinnie asked whether Vollard
Kaye would have taken such a case, and Rod firmly denied it. “But
doesn’t even the most hardened criminal deserve a good defense?” she asked. “Certainly.
But hardened criminals, at least the rich ones, of whom, alas, there are only
too many, can be very picky in choosing counsel. The problem, however, would
never arise with us. No gangster would ever come knocking at our door. He’d
know that his defense would be an absolutely honest one, with no dirty tricks.
And that’s the last thing he’d want.” “You
imply that the firm representing the gangster in question is using dirty
tricks?” “If
it deems them necessary, yes. We’re not all perfect.” “Only
Vollard Kaye?” “Only
Vollard Kaye.” Rod smiled, as if to make the boast
a jest, but she saw that he meant it well enough. “I
wonder,” Harry now observed, “if we would be quite so pure if we didn’t
already have a plethora of less tainted fees. ~We can afford to dispense with
dirty tricks. At least with the dirty tricks of the mob.” “You
mean you have other kinds?” Vinnie asked. “Oh,
we have our nuances and innuendos.” “What
do you mean by that?” There was just a hint of a snarl in Rod’s tone. “Oh,
simply, my dear fellow, that we have the luxury of representing conquerors.
After they have been all cleaned up and the blood washed away. Now that
William the “I
suppose you’re referring to the cutthroat methods of some of our nineteenth-century
robber barons.” “Precisely.
Were they not the predecessors of some of our most respectable corporate
clients? And were not their counsel the predecessors of firms like ours?” “You
imply that we’re no different from them?” “I
imply that it might take a mother’s eye to spot the difference.” Rod’s
cheeks had taken on a tint of red. “You think, then, that if I’d been a
lawyer in those days I’d have advised our railroad clients to buy
legislatures and get around the rate limits with illegal kickbacks?” “Not
at all. You’d have been your clever self. You’d have been the master of the
gentleman’s cover-up and earned yourself as honorable a reputation as you
have today. It was the name of the game, Rod! “You
don’t know me, Harry!” Harry’s
smile simply broadened at this outburst. “Do I not?” lie appealed to Vinnie. “You know the portrait of your great-uncle de Peyster that hangs in our reception hall? That perfectly
tailored little gentleman with the trim goatee who seems to glance down at
the visitors and wonder who let them in. Isn’t there a hint of slyness behind
that serene gaze? Well, Rod has improved on him. The mask is now perfect. The
hint of slyness is quite gone! Welcome to the age of the knight-errant!” When
Vinnie laughed, which seemed to be what he was
seeking, Harry hastened to mollify his friend. “Of course, my dear Rod, I was
only pulling your leg. We all know you’re true blue.” Sitting
beside Harry a week later at one of her father’s Sunday lunches, she decided
to get a few things straight. In the mock serious tone one adopts when one is
really serious, she asked him, “You don’t believe in anything, do you, Harry?
I mean in God or ethical principles or anything like that?” “Well,
I’m a positivist, if that’s what you mean. It all has to be proved to me. I
believe in taste. Good taste and bad.” “You
mean as in interior decoration?” “If
you like. That’s one aspect of it. I think it’s bad
taste to rob or murder or covet your neighbor’s wife.” Here he rolled his
eyes comically. “Though I might be forgiven the last.” She
did not comment on this. “And you certainly don’t think it’s
good taste to keep lauding the sanctity of Vollard
Kaye.” “I
don’t find my partners apostles, as some do.” “For
some, read Rod Jessup?” “Well,
he certainly seems to find your father one.” “And
you don’t.” He
laughed. “Oh, I admire him! He can thunder like Jehovah and grin like Satan.
He’s a primordial demiurge.” “I
think Rod really worships him.” “Oh,
Rod approaches him as the monkeys approach the rock python Kaa in The Jungle Book. But one day he’ll come too close
and get caught in those writhing coils.” “What
do you mean by that?” “You’ll
see, my dear. You’ll see.” And he ended the discussion by turning to the lady
on his other side. What
Harry seemed to be dangling before her eyes was the flattering notion that
she was not realizing her full potential, not living her own life to the full. And if one wasn’t doing that, could one escape the
suspicion that one wasn’t really living at all? Had she been given all her
blessings — and, ironically, weren’t they just the blessings of which an
earthly paradise was supposed to be full: a loving family, good health, money
and social position? — simply that the imps of
comedy might laugh at her? She
quite saw that Harry might be something bad. That there might be, after all,
a snake in her “When
people tell you to count your blessings,” Harry told her, “it means they’re
on to you. They’ve sniffed out the fact that you don’t appreciate all they
have done for you. And they resent that. You’re like a child on Christmas Day
whose parents have substituted their own list for the one you left on the
chimney for Santa.” “And
that child was cheated!” she exclaimed. “It doesn’t matter that the parents
thought their list should have pleased her more.” She
found herself trying to see Harry in a more positive light. It wasn’t so
much, she sought to persuade herself, that he was tempting her to deny
anything in her life; he was endeavoring, on the contrary, to make her
realize that she needn’t be ashamed of being a freer and more interesting
specimen of humanity than the lot with whom fate had thrown her. So long as
she didn’t look down on these — and she didn’t think she did —
she could exchange an occasional wink with someone
who found himself in the same boat. Yet she had to admit that Harry himself
did sometimes look down on people. And one of those people, she was afraid,
was Rod. Harry
didn’t work as many nights in the office as Rod did, claiming that if one
arrived at eight in the morning and stayed until seven at night and didn’t
“shoot the breeze” with fellow workers and take a two-hour lunch, one should
be able to get all one’s work done in the time allotted. The result was that
he was often free to take Vinnie to plays or
concerts to which she had tickets but to which, at the last moment, her
husband was too busy to go. And sometimes he would take her afterwards for a
nightcap to his elegant little duplex, the garden apartment of an old
brownstone, to which he had a private entrance. Listening
to him as he took apart the old world of her lares
and penates seemed to demonstrate to her that all
her old doubts and reservations had not been merely the idle fancies that
flutter through any unoccupied mind, but were substantial parts of her own
being, and perhaps sinful parts as well. What made her almost welcome this
belated, as she saw it, recognition of naughtiness was that it had a reality
that her previous recognition, or fancied recognition, had lacked. She might
be damned, but didn’t one have to have been alive before one was damned?
Wasn’t it possibly worth it? As
her talks with Harry became more and more personal, he told her some of the
problems of his private life. He had, the year before, broken off a long
affair with a woman because she had wanted to marry him. “But why didn’t you marry her?” Vinnie had asked. “Because I didn’t love her.” “But, Harry, the time is coming when
you ought to settle down. You’re not twenty-one, my dear. Some men are not
destined to fall head over heels in love. I don’t think the greatest men are
apt to feel passion in that way. Daddy, for example. I doubt if he ever
really loved my mother. But you want to have a family and children, don’t
you?” “With the right woman, yes.” “And what sort of woman is that?” “Well, say a woman like you.” She didn’t reply to this, and he didn’t
press the point. But they continued, on other occasions, to discuss sexual
matters with what she liked to think was a clinical detachment, and in due
course they came to an analysis of her own. Harry at last extracted from her
the admission that she had never had sex with any man but Rod. “I think it’s a pity,” he informed her
blandly, “for any woman to be so limited. Far be it from me to say anything
about Rod’s performance in bed, which I’m sure is
very fine, but there are joys in variety and experimentation, and in an ideal
society I don’t think any man or woman should be confined for life to a
single mate. There ought to be ways of extending one’s experience without
incurring blame for broken vows. Indeed, that is why wife swapping is not an
uncommon suburban practice.” “Really? Do you think it ever happens
in Glenville?” “I know damn well it happens in
Glenville.” “Rod would die at the very idea.” “I agree that he would. So it could
never happen to him. Anyway, I have no wife to offer him in return.” “And just what the hell do you mean by that?” “My dear Vinnie,
you know very well what I mean by that.” Which, of course, she did. Which, of
course, they had been leading each other to. So here it was, right on the
table. He did not try to fool her with any perfervid declaration of passion;
he simply put it on the ground of a sensible, even a civilized, division of
her life into what could be with a little care, a little concern for the
feelings and prejudices of others — a
series of watertight compartments. There was no reason to believe,
he now insisted to her, that what prudes called adultery had always to be
found out. He knew of any number of cases, including couples of her
acquaintance, where the so-called betrayed spouse remained in permanent and
blissful ignorance of what was going on. Vinnie
remained mostly silent on the occasions when he expounded his sexual
philosophy, but her mind was afire with erotic images. One night, while Rod was on a business
trip to Chicago, Harry, after taking her to a movie and afterward to his flat
for the usual nightcap, had retired, for an oddly prolonged time, to his
bedroom, leaving her alone with her drink. When he suddenly appeared in the
doorway, she gasped. He was clad only in a silk kimono with an unmistakable
bulge at his crotch. “Be not alarmed,” he reassured her
calmly. “No hand will be laid upon you. I am going to put on a record of the
great duet from the second act of Tristan. It is, of course,
notoriously the musical expression of the physical union of the lovers. I
suggest that we listen to it in silence, after which you will be entirely
free to choose your own finale. It can end in your stormy exit, like the
bustle of King Mark, in which case I shall simply call you a taxi, or in our
happier submission to what I am bold enough to call our most mutual
attraction.” She thought he looked almost
magnificent as he stood there, silent now, before her. Then, when she nodded,
he placed the record carefully on the machine and switched it on. She
listened, transfixed, to the glorious voices of Flagstad
and Meichior until Mark burst in to interrupt their
climax. Harry rose, turned off the instrument, and faced her with a grave
look of inquiry. Again she nodded, and he opened his kimono. In
the months that followed she found feverishly rewarding the different ways of
lovemaking to which her imaginative and widely experienced guide introduced
her. Their rendezvous were always in his apartment and took place at noon, on
his ostensible lunch hour. In this new school she proved herself an eager and
proficient student, and the guilt that now assailed her in every hour when
she was not with him seemed even to add to the overall intensity of her
pleasure. When she thought of the horror that some of her doings would arouse
in Rod (whose suspicion she was careful not to arouse by any interruption of
marital relations), or in her father; when she heard, ringing in her head,
their imagined exclamations of “decadent” or “depraved,” she thought, with an
acceptance and resignation, that heaven and hell had to be different places,
and never the twain should meet. On
Harry she now felt a dependence that was more like the blind devotion of a
dog than a love in any romantic sense of the word. She took him as a kind of
new god who had ravished her and become her master. One Sunday morning, when
Rod was again away on a business trip, and she had gone to Harry’s flat instead
of taking the girls to church, and found herself nude, kneeling on his living
room rug, her hands clasping his bare buttocks and her lips receiving his
ejaculated sperm, she knew, with a dreary satisfaction, that she had no
further to fall. Readers
come away from The
Scarlet Letters both questioning and understanding the complicated
behavior of all the characters Auchincloss presents
with such clarity. From the beginning to the end of the above excerpt, Auchincloss takes us into Vinnie’s
life, and we understand her passion and desire in new ways, thanks to his
fine writing. Executive readers may wince from time to time with resonance
about worklife and the implications and
consequences of the compromises that can be made in the workplace. Steve
Hopkins, April 23, 2004 |
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ă 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the May 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Scarlet Letters.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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