The House of the Prophet by Louis Auchincloss

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

Roger Cutter (3)

I HAD KNOWN Felix Leitner since my childhood, but it was at Seal Cove, Maine, in my twenty-second year that we first became friends. Seal Cove contained a small but rather intensely intellectual summer community of which my parents and the Leitners were charter members and of which the Lassiter Troys were the undisputed leaders. Lassiter Troy, who in 1938 was in his early eighties, was the splendid, white-haired veteran of American repertory, a relic of the school of Henry Irving, who had performed across the nation in Cyrano, Richelieu and The Green Goddess, and was to many school children of the generation preceding mine the physical embodiment of King Lear and Macbeth. I had seen his farewell performance as Falstaff and had admired the powerful, resonant voice and the gravely mocking, sharply staring eyes, even though to my more modern way of thinking his interpretation smacked more of Santa Claus than of Shakespeare’s dissipated old reprobate.

Mrs. Troy, a fine, plain, faintly grim New England crone, had never been on the boards and had never, I suspected, quite approved of the world of paint and pasteboard, but her conjugal loyalty (unlike his) had been absolute, and in a marriage that had lasted more than five decades she had kept his homes in trim order, brought up his children with a discipline rare in theatrical circles and invested his earnings so as to turn them into a small fortune. The Troys, like most of our Seal Cove community, lived in a camp, but their principal log cabin boasted an immense two-story living room with a balcony that ran around three of the walls, a huge stone fireplace and an alarming collection of heads and fangs and spread antlers. This room was the social center of Seal.

My parents’ cabin was the next down the cove, not nearly so large but commodious, in the easy style of pre-World War I arrangements. Daddy, a professor of philosophy at Columbia, moderately famous in that day, could never bear to be separated from his books, and he had built shelves to the ceiling in our living room. But although he was inclined to read at night in the city during Columbia’s term, he loved the social life at Seal, and his great bearlike figure and shaggy, shaking gray head could be seen at any party at the Troys, where he loved to take active part in the most complicated charades, leading his obedient team in or out of the hall like a drill sergeant after preparing, or performing, his scenes. Mother was quite different. She never participated in the games, but made up a serene audience of one, engaged in the needlepoint that she always brought with her, her broad clear forehead and un-waved gray hair creating for her inner privacy a barrier that was pliant yet unyielding, a kind of willow fence, a sash of some pale Indian material that protected without unduly decorating.

The summer of 1938 was a dark one for me, for it followed the spring in which I had suffered a near-fatal attack of diabetes.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.