A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Online Free PDF Page A
Author: Louis Auchincloss
court when the mother of the defendant rose and screamed, "Are you, Marshall Field, son of one of the richest men in this country, going to disgrace my poor boy for life by throwing him out of this university?"
When Marshall joined me later he was mopping his brow. "There's got to be an easier way to make a living," he muttered.
In the war he served creditably as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier and in peace untangled the snarl of his father's newspapers, until the Field darkness that had caused his grandfather's suicide and other family tragedies descended upon him.
I draw the curtain.
4. A Few Words About Women
O F COURSE, like most men I judged women by my mother. As the wife of a prosperous lawyer, she had two nurses to care for four minor children, a cook for her meals, a waitress to serve them, a chambermaid to clean the house, and a chauffeur to drive her. Her days were thus free for some not very taxing charity work, lunches with friends at her club, matinees or concerts, visits to museums.
If a woman were intellectually ambitious, which my mother was, she could take courses at Columbia or the New School. In the hot months, when we moved from town to the country and I was sometimes taken to meet my commuter father on his evening train, I contrasted the sweating cheek that he gave me to kiss with the cool one of Mother's beside the swimming pool. Why was it so great to be a man?
At my day school in the city I had a friend whose family sent him to classes in a red Rolls-Royce limousine that I greatly envied. I did not much ingratiate myself with Mother when I asked her, "If you went downtown to work like Daddy, do you think that between you, you could make enough money so we could have a red Rolls-Royce?"
Why should one rest while the other toiled? I didn't get it.
It was commonly said that because so many women were possessed of great wealth in their own right, that they exercised considerable economic power. It is truer to say that they could have. But all that was left by tacit consent to the men. Women, before they took jobs in the professions, were content with the power they exercised in the home, where they ran the household and the children, selected the life style and the friends, chose the vacation spots and the charities to be supported and even the church to be attended. The problems of finance and moneymaking they didn't even want to hear about. Their attitude was summed up by this bit of dialogue between husband and wife from T. S. Eliot's
The Cocktail Party.
LAVINIA: It's only that I have a more practical mind.
EDWARD: Only because you've told me so often. I'd like to see
you
filling up an income-tax form.
LAVINIA: Don't be silly, Edward. When I say practical, I mean practical in the things that really matter.
Men accepted this division eagerly, thinking that they had won, as did women, with more reason. If a woman made her own fortune, except in a conceded territory as the stage or cosmetics, men called her a witch, like Hetty Green. Women didn't care what Hetty Green was called, and they were right. It didn't matter.
***
Mother's woman friends were mostly in their early fifties when an old Groton classmate of mine remarked of one of them (whom I shall call Rosette) crudely but interestingly, that she alone of the group remembered that she was still a woman. I was rather taken aback, but, thinking it over, I began to see what he meant. Rosette had a bit of French blood, and she made the most of it. Her eyes, her gestures, her tone of voice in the presence of men showed not only her awareness of their difference but her pleasure in it. I do not in the least mean that she was provocative or flirty; it was to imply that to her the fact that the sexes had a reason for being differently constructed was always in the picture.
Did that mean that males had to be catered to?
Never.
French women are absolute rulers in their own domain. But what did my Groton friend think of the rest of
When Marshall joined me later he was mopping his brow. "There's got to be an easier way to make a living," he muttered.
In the war he served creditably as an officer aboard an aircraft carrier and in peace untangled the snarl of his father's newspapers, until the Field darkness that had caused his grandfather's suicide and other family tragedies descended upon him.
I draw the curtain.
4. A Few Words About Women
O F COURSE, like most men I judged women by my mother. As the wife of a prosperous lawyer, she had two nurses to care for four minor children, a cook for her meals, a waitress to serve them, a chambermaid to clean the house, and a chauffeur to drive her. Her days were thus free for some not very taxing charity work, lunches with friends at her club, matinees or concerts, visits to museums.
If a woman were intellectually ambitious, which my mother was, she could take courses at Columbia or the New School. In the hot months, when we moved from town to the country and I was sometimes taken to meet my commuter father on his evening train, I contrasted the sweating cheek that he gave me to kiss with the cool one of Mother's beside the swimming pool. Why was it so great to be a man?
At my day school in the city I had a friend whose family sent him to classes in a red Rolls-Royce limousine that I greatly envied. I did not much ingratiate myself with Mother when I asked her, "If you went downtown to work like Daddy, do you think that between you, you could make enough money so we could have a red Rolls-Royce?"
Why should one rest while the other toiled? I didn't get it.
It was commonly said that because so many women were possessed of great wealth in their own right, that they exercised considerable economic power. It is truer to say that they could have. But all that was left by tacit consent to the men. Women, before they took jobs in the professions, were content with the power they exercised in the home, where they ran the household and the children, selected the life style and the friends, chose the vacation spots and the charities to be supported and even the church to be attended. The problems of finance and moneymaking they didn't even want to hear about. Their attitude was summed up by this bit of dialogue between husband and wife from T. S. Eliot's
The Cocktail Party.
LAVINIA: It's only that I have a more practical mind.
EDWARD: Only because you've told me so often. I'd like to see
you
filling up an income-tax form.
LAVINIA: Don't be silly, Edward. When I say practical, I mean practical in the things that really matter.
Men accepted this division eagerly, thinking that they had won, as did women, with more reason. If a woman made her own fortune, except in a conceded territory as the stage or cosmetics, men called her a witch, like Hetty Green. Women didn't care what Hetty Green was called, and they were right. It didn't matter.
***
Mother's woman friends were mostly in their early fifties when an old Groton classmate of mine remarked of one of them (whom I shall call Rosette) crudely but interestingly, that she alone of the group remembered that she was still a woman. I was rather taken aback, but, thinking it over, I began to see what he meant. Rosette had a bit of French blood, and she made the most of it. Her eyes, her gestures, her tone of voice in the presence of men showed not only her awareness of their difference but her pleasure in it. I do not in the least mean that she was provocative or flirty; it was to imply that to her the fact that the sexes had a reason for being differently constructed was always in the picture.
Did that mean that males had to be catered to?
Never.
French women are absolute rulers in their own domain. But what did my Groton friend think of the rest of
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