Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss [Auchincloss, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780618152896
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2002-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

He Knew He Was Right

NEW YEAR'S DAY is the morn for resolutions, and today, being the first of 1951 and opening a half-century, seems well timed. I take pen in hand therefore to record with an accuracy as scrupulous as my power permits, for the ultimate benefit of my two sons, now nine and ten, who are being raised largely outside my parental control, that they may understand, when mature enough to read this memorandum (which I shall leave with my lawyer to ensure its preservation) that their father was not the moral monster that their mother and her kin have depicted. Whatever the boys may conclude, they will have had the chance to hear my side of the story—the story, as I may put it, of my sexual philosophy and its application to my life.

My family background will be familiar to them; it is pretty much the same as their mother's. The Belknaps were old Manhattan of English source, Episcopal burghers of brownstone respectability, with the virtues and vices of their class. One of my father's grandfathers bought a substitute to fight for him in the Civil War; the other died in action, a gallant cavalry colonel. Few of the family stood out from the crowd, nor do I think they much wanted to. Pierce Belknap, my father, was a middle partner in a middle-sized but distinguished Wall Street law firm that bore the name of a deceased forebear to whom he largely owed his position. Stella, my mother, was known for her looks and charm, as well as for her almost too exquisite little dinner parties. We lived in a constantly redecorated brownstone on lower Park Avenue and spent our summers on the north shore of Long Island. I was sent, after years at the Browning School, to Saint Jude's, a church boarding academy for boys in New Hampshire, a great gray Gothic conglomerate where God may have once been and left. I had one sibling, a younger sister, Rhoda, who was shrilly and ineffectively at war with her family and life.

I was christened Robert, but Mother dubbed me Robin, perhaps in the disappointed hope that I would turn out gentler than I promised, and the name, which I have never liked, has stuck. I was hardly an amiable child, and certainly not like the bird that was my namesake, the herald of spring. If I was always strong for my age, I was sullen of disposition, dark-haired and dark-complexioned, an ugly enough brute, though my appearance improved as I grew up, at least in the eyes of one of the sexes. I may quote what my best (and sometimes, I think, my only real) friend, Newton Chandler, said of me once, perhaps not entirely jokingly: "Robin looked like a surly dead-end kid, but he was so quiet and stand-offish that one began to suspect he was hiding some inner sensibility, perhaps even a yearning for sympathy and affection, but when one approached him with this in mind, it was to find that one's first impression had been the right one.

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