The Book Class by Louis Auchincloss

Author:Louis Auchincloss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

9

THE MOST PATHETIC—or perhaps I should say the only pathetic—member of the Book Class was Leila Lee. She called herself “Mrs. Lee,” although that was her maiden name. She had been twice married and twice divorced, from George Washburn and from Tony Meiksel; the second had been such a horror that she could not endure to bear his label, and it would have seemed quixotic to resume that of his discarded predecessor. But, logical as her choice may have been, it nonetheless made her stand out in undesirable isolation in a group of women to whom the retention of a born name by a matron smacked vulgarly of greasepaint and footlights.

Leila’s name, however, was not the cause of her being seen by them as “different.” She saw herself as different in that she was more feminine, and she could never fathom why the Class did not agree that this made her enviable. But they didn’t. They liked her, but she was always, nonetheless, “poor Leila” to them.

What I am really talking about, of course, is sex appeal, or, more accurately, the attitude of the Book Class towards it. To Leila, who had been a beauty in a day when a great deal was made of beauty, when simply being beautiful was considered an adequate occupation, the great business of life was men. What she could never take in was not that her friends in the Class had other businesses, but that they refused to concede that hers was even a respectable one. Leila knew that women the world over were constantly concerned with men; she read it in romantic novels, she saw it in romantic movies and plays; she discussed it happily with hairdressers, nail-polishers, dressmakers and shop girls, and had not her husbands and lovers confirmed it? How was it that this dowdy—yes, dowdy!—group, which met to discuss novels about great passions that they could have known only in print dared to dub her (as she was sure they all mentally did) a tart?

I did not become a friend of Leila’s until she was in her late sixties, in 1957, when I started playing bridge one night a week at Blodgett’s, a card club. She and I were occasional partners. Of course, I had known her since my childhood, but I had tended to think of her as a charming pinhead, much less interesting than Mother’s other friends. I was impressed now by the quality of her game. Of course, there were no idiots at Blodgett’s; the stakes were too high. And she was still stunning to look at, tall, fine, stylish in black and gold, with large jewelry, big pins shaped like bees, and heavy gold bracelets that clinked together as she deftly dealt, incessantly smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder. The lovely looks were, it is true, by this time a bit frozen, and the golden-pink hair was, of course, dyed, but there was still an air of extraordinary grace and refinement in the soft

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