Fellow Passengers: A Novel in Portraits

By Louis Auchincloss

In this novel by the author of The Golden Calves set in 1930s high society, a young man recounts the people in his life and what he’s learned from them.

This superb gallery of portraits gathers its wit and resonance from the discerning eye of the central narrator, Dan Ruggles, who in the course of unraveling the dreams, doubts, and loyalties of those around him inevitably reveals his own.

Dan spends his boyhood in the company of old-money aunts from Bar Harbor and polo-playing uncles from Argentina. He stumbles upon the complexities of adulthood at Yale in the 1930s, and grows to worldly maturity at the Wall Street law firm that provides him not only with a vocation but with seemingly endless material for his fiction. Fellow passengers are the people in his life, each one a story and each one a lesson. Only Auchincloss can ferret out with such precision and understanding the secrets, foibles, and ironies that lie just beneath the proper Establishment surface. This is Louis Auchincloss at the top of his form—a book to please his many admirers and delightful introduction for new readers as well.

Praise for Fellow Passengers

“This gallery of American upper-class characters, Auchincloss’s 41st book, reflects the acutely perceptive insight that distinguishes much of his fiction. Lineage, the right schools, clubs and marriages are of crucial concern to the matrons, debutantes, establishment bankers and lawyers whose vapid lives, as revealed in these stories, often founder on underpinnings of dark secrets and skewed loyalties . . . . Richly entertaining vignettes.” —Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 20, 1989
• ISBN: 9780547970479

Louis Auchincloss

Louis Auchincloss was honored in the year 2000 as a “Living Landmark” by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. During his long career he wrote more than sixty books, including the story collection Manhattan Monologues and the novel The Rector of Justin. The former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters, he resided in New York City until his death in January 2010.

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Copyright © 1989 by Louis Auchincloss

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Auchincloss, Louis.

Fellow passengers.

I. Title.

PS3501.U25F45 1989 813'.54 88-23099

ISBN 0-395-49853-8

eISBN 978-0-547-97047-9

v2.0421

The quotation on page vii is from Harold Nicolson’s Some People, copyright © 1982 by Nigel Nicolson, and is reprinted with the permission of Atheneum Publishers, an imprint of Macmillan Publishing Company. The verses on page 75 are from The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, copyright 1939, 1940, © 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright © 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Symons, and are reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

For Lee and Peter Schoenburg

I use the same foreword that Harold Nicolson used for his Some People, which gave me my conception for this collection:

Many of the following sketches are purely imaginary. Such truths as they may contain are only half-truths.

Aunt Mabel

FROM MY TWELFTH to my fifteenth year, in the early 1930s, my parents used to rent a cottage for the summer in Bar Harbor, on beautiful Mount Desert Island just off the Maine coast. Sometimes, when my older brother, Jasper, was in camp, and Father had been called back to New York on business and Mother chose to go with him, I would be sent over to Bonniecrest to stay with my Ruggles grandparents. Their Maine summer was longer than ours; it began punctually on the second Monday of June and ended on the second Monday of September. Once I remained until the final day, coming down with them on the Bar Harbor Express, after having observed with curiosity the elaborate final cleaning and dusting of the whole establishment, the enshrouding of furniture in slipcovers, the hammering in of storm windows, and the enveloping of sentimental garden statuary in wooden crates.

Father used to make fun of the rigor of his parents’ routine (though never to their faces), but I secretly admired it. I liked the hushed atmosphere of the asymmetrical shingle villa, humped atop a small hill and surrounded by woods, except where a cut provided a dazzling view from the verandah of Frenchman’s Bay. I loved the big clean airy rooms, the matted floors, the heavy mahogany chairs, and the old Irish maidservants, who crept in when Grandmother rang for them (she never hollered, as Mother did). I liked sitting in the dark library with Grandpa, a huge, silent, friendly man, with a rumbling laugh and a round pot, who never did a stroke of exercise (unless fishing be called that) and sat inside all day until his afternoon drive with Grandmother in a hired Packard touring car driven by a youth from the Bar Harbor Motor Company. He had shelves of large illustrated volumes about the families and mistresses of French kings, which he and I both read with relish, exchanging occasional comments, when my high tones must have offered a funny contrast to his gravelly mutterings. But it was delightful not to have Mother barging in and exclaiming, "How can you sit inside on a lovely day like this? What’s the point of taking you to Maine if this is all you do? And what are you reading? An Infamous Regent’s Rule? What tosh! Go out at once and practice your forehand against the backboard."

Grandpa, to his family and household, and except in occasional temper tantrums, was something of a cipher; it was his wife who, in her quiet, ineluctable way, dominated the interior. She suffered from something that she called nervous tension, and she had, years before, become a convert to the famous rest cures of the novelist-psychiatrist S. Weir Mitchell. The reason for the finger-on-the-lips silence that pervaded Bonniecrest was that Grandmother, at almost any odd hour of the day, might be lying down in her bedroom with the shades pulled. She was small and dignified, with a charming soft laugh, and had been supposed to be something of a beauty in her youth. But she and Mother, though outwardly on the best of terms, were not truly sympathetic. I had heard enough of my parents’ conversations at home to have gleaned that Mother did not share the Ruggles family’s sympathy for Grandmother’s frail health, which she regarded as the symptom of a chronic valetudinarianism.

There was an episode to which Mother often mysteriously referred as the cold beam of light that had at last revealed the sacrosanct Julia Ruggles to her son. Ultimately I made out that it was this: Father in the summer of 1920 had been taken in as a partner of his law firm. But when he wrote to his parents, then in Maine, to give them this jubilant news, there had been no response. Meeting their train at Grand Central that September, he had inquired dryly if they had not received his letter. Oh yes, my dear boy, his mother had replied, and we were so proud! But it was the time of that terrible bomb attack on Morgan’s, and your father and I were too upset to answer any of our correspondence. The blast from the mysterious wagon parked outside 23 Wall Street had actually shattered the window of the office where Father had been working, twenty stories above. But as Mother never failed to remind him, it had not reached as far as Maine.

Children are quick to take advantage of a situation, and I found it fun to irritate Mother by parading my affection and admiration for Grandmother, divining that as a loyal in-law she could not openly deprecate this. And in truth some of my feeling was genuine. Although I was quite aware that Grandmother’s interest in my little affairs, however civil, had a perfunctory quality, it fascinated me to hear her talk of her own distant childhood, and it thrilled my developing historical imagination when she told the story of how she had heard, at the age of eight, sitting in the children’s dining room of her father’s Fifth Avenue brownstone, the piercing Irish wails from below stairs: Mr. Lincoln is shot! Mr. Lincoln is dead! Then, too, an early snobbish instinct helped me to make out from her discourse the fact that her family, the Le-roys, had been in their day much sweller and older New York than the Ruggleses, or than Mother’s family, the Fishers. And it struck me as rather splendid that she should have preserved all their ancient prejudices intact and taken quite for granted that Mrs. Gould Bell, the smartest hostess on the island, would have given up her four-masted schooner to be invited to what I had once overheard Mother describe as Grandmother’s dowdy dinner parties. Yet even at my tender age I suspected that Mrs. Bell was not even aware of Grandmother or of the fact that, as a divorcée, she would not have been welcome at Bonniecrest.

There were exceptions to Grandmother’s rule. Uncle Jonathan, Father’s older brother, had been divorced. But then, as Mother used to say, Uncle Jonathan was the only person whom Grandmother ever really loved. It seemed a curious preference. Uncle Jonathan’s nickname at Yale had been Stiffy, and never was a sobriquet more appropriate. He was a ramrod of a man, with a huge sharp nose, straight hair slicked back over his high dome, and suits that never showed a wrinkle. He gave an air of importance to his least actions, hiking up his trousers as he sat down, perching his pince-nez carefully on the thin bridge of his nose, uttering loud introductory coughs before even the most banal remark, or giving vent to the bray of a laugh whose very friendliness was intended to make up for the fact that it was all the friendliness one was going to get from him. Uncle Jonathan had been married to a beautiful and frivolous lady who twenty years before had fled in horror from him, and their daughter, now adult, was living in Paris under circumstances not revealed to me but evidently reprehensible, as for once Mother and Grandmother agreed on a subject.

Uncle Jonathan, at any rate, seemed never to have shown the least interest in remarrying, and he had long lived as a confirmed bachelor with his parents in New York and Maine. In town he was a banker of sorts and dined every night at a single table at the Union Club. Father, who clung all his life to the resentments of a kid brother who had been obliged to shine the shoes of his mother’s favorite, never missed the chance, even under his wife’s warning eye, to insinuate, with a wink and a chuckle, that Stiffy made long visits to the Union Club bar and shorter ones to certain unmentionable female establishments. This was not really like Father, but sibling rivalries do strange things to even the most generous-minded people.

Uncle Jonathan and I, during my visits to his parents, maintained a formal relationship, but one perfectly satisfactory to each. He approved of children who asked nothing of him. Hello there, young fellow, he would boom out when I appeared at the breakfast table, what sort of mischief are you planning today? And that would pretty well do it for another twenty-four hours. I shared with Grandpa the court at Versailles and with Grandmother the tales of old Manhattan. But greater warmth was not altogether lacking at Bonniecrest. There was Aunt Mabel, Father’s younger sister, whose love of everyone filled the house whenever she came.

The term maiden aunt is today considered a pejorative one, and so it was in my boyhood. But if people hadn’t said it, they would have thought it. For although Aunt Mabel was as naturally cheerful and as spontaneously kind as Uncle Jonathan was falsely hearty and self-absorbed, although she was more charitable and public-spirited than any other member of the family, there was still a note of condescension even in the warmest encomiums that her relatives accorded her. Aunt Mabel at forty-plus was not now going to marry and have children, and that was what the Ruggleses, including my indubitably intelligent mother, considered the essential function of a woman. If she didn’t do that, the implication seemed to be, she could jolly well stay home and look after the old folks, a fate that poor Aunt Mabel appeared docilely to accept. In New York, it was true, she worked five days a week at a settlement house and sometimes dined with her old-maid friends, but she was always on call if Grandmother needed her, and in the long Maine summers she provided most of the slim diversion her parents had.

She was supposed to have been briefly pretty as a young woman, but I remember her with a round, pleasant, rather undistinguished countenance, innocent of any make-up, and thick dark hair that was never waved, in accordance with Grandmother’s theory that permanents dimmed the natural luster of one’s locks. But when she laughed, which she often did, the skin of her face had a charming way of crinkling up, and the infectious rumble of her chuckle was beguiling.

She was, in short, the best-natured creature in the world. She treated children as adults and adults sometimes as children; nothing seemed to curb her persistent good will and optimism. Why had no man married her? According to Father, two very attractive men (who later were successful on Wall Street) had wanted to, but Aunt Mabel, each time in a flurry of nerves, had not been able to make up her mind. Mother always maintained that Grandmother had failed in her job of steadying her through these crises, but then Grandmother never took responsibility for anyone, even for Uncle Jonathan.

Aunt Mabel offered me the kind of companionship that any child with constantly overseeing parents wants: she listened and laughed and applauded without seeming to find it necessary to correct or improve. On our walks on the mountains (really hills) of Mount Desert—expeditions in which, disliking all organized athletics, I reveled—she would smile pleasantly as I no doubt bored her with episodes of French court history that I had read with Grandpa. Her mild ruminations would be limited to Gosh, for a thirteen-year-old you’re quite a whiz in history, aren’t you? or Do you think you might like to teach when you grow up? But these were enough to satisfy me.

On these walks I used to create fantasies in which Mount Desert Island became a kingdom independent of the hostile Maineland, and the visiting units of the U.S. Navy, viewed at anchor in the harbor from the top of Cadillac Mountain, were an invading enemy flotilla. I did not consider such daydreaming really worthy of a student of history, and I would have bit off my tongue before sharing it with anyone else. But Aunt Mabel was somehow different, and when I pointed to the gray hulk of the battleship New York, its formidability dwindled to a toy model, and identified it as the flagship of the hostile armada, she joined in the game with a zest which, although it did not meet my mood (I learned at once that such fantasies, by their very nature, are unshareable), in no way humiliated me. She exclaimed, Yes, and I can see by the dragon pennant that the old dowager queen mother is on board! They must have carried her in her golden palanquin up to the bridge so she can gloat over the bombardment of her native town. For she was born a princess of Mount Desert, you know, and never forgave her parents for selling her to the monarch of Maine.

When my parents came up for a late summer weekend at Bonniecrest, having closed their own cottage for the season, it surprised me to note how Aunt Mabel seemed to defer to Mother. She and Father were apt to revert to the joshing, scrapping relationship of their earlier years, but with Mother she was much more serious and was inclined to discuss such topics as fund raising for her settlement house or what courses it might be interesting to take that fall at Columbia. This, I suspect, was not only because Mother was more broad-minded than any of the Ruggleses. It was because she took Aunt Mabel seriously as a human being. The fact that she partially shared the family feeling that Aunt Mabel had missed her main goal in life did not mean that her life had to be barren or dull. Mother was anxious that Aunt Mabel should make the best of what she had left.

That she was actually helping Aunt Mabel to hatch a career came out in the late August of 1932. It was revealed during the crisis occasioned by Uncle Jonathan’s unexpected descent to New York and his almost immediate return, accompanied by his staid, elderly, long-suffering secretary, Miss Fenno, whom he put up in a hotel in the village. Word had reached him of the desperate illness from pneumonia of his daughter, Cynthia, in Paris, and foreseeing that his family would expect him to hurry at once to her bedside, he retired to the isolation of his chamber, from which he dispatched Miss Fenno with dictated memos to his parents and mine and to Aunt Mabel. Miss Fenno would then take their dictated answers back to him. It was an extraordinary performance.

Anxious to know what was going on, I cornered Aunt Mabel in Grandmother’s garden where she was cutting damask roses and demanded if I wasn’t old enough to be told. She straightened up and gazed thoughtfully at her shears.

Why, yes, I guess so, honey. The trouble is that we all think your Uncle Jonathan should go over, and he won’t it.

Why won’t he?

Because he disapproves of the way Cynthia’s living. She shares a flat with a man. Aunt Mabel faced me now with a look that made me feel very grown-up indeed. A man she’s not married to.

I puckered my brow in what I hoped was the frown of a man of the world. Why don’t they marry?

Because he has a wife. Here Aunt Mabel actually winked at me. And one who won’t give him a divorce. So they’ll have to wait till he’s a widower. Only that doesn’t seem very likely. Actually, I’m afraid it may be the other way round. For he’s got pneumonia, too.

What do Father and Mother think?

Oh, they think Uncle Jonathan should go. We all do. It’s no time for making moral judgments. They’re getting very mad at him.

You, too?

Well, I don’t see the point. People are what they are. Jonathan won’t go, and that’s that. How does it help to get mad?

Nothing could have more intensified my sense of being treated as an equal than her referring to Uncle Jonathan simply by his Christian name. I was at once transported into her world, and I even seemed to make out that behind the façade of Aunt Mabel’s buoyancy, behind what I had once heard Father slightingly describe as her girl scoutism, there might exist an assessment of the great world quite as shrewd and realistic as his own. The sudden dark, almost fatigued look in her soft brown eyes made