Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters by Austen-Leigh William

Author:Austen-Leigh, William [Austen-Leigh, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9781493615919
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 11058864
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2011-04-28T00:00:00+00:00

But then, something happened to change my mind, not only about Mansfield Park but also about myself. A year or so after I’d begun to hang around the private-school crowd, my friend and his girlfriend got married. It was more like a coronation than a wedding: a rehearsal dinner the night before at an elegant restaurant overlooking the East River, a stately ceremony in the grand space of an East Side Episcopal church, and an opulent, impeccably tasteful reception at a private club nearby. I fished my best shoes out from the back of the closet and bought my first new suit since my bar mitzvah. Hundreds of people attended, most of them from the bride’s parents’ rarefied sphere of business associates and social contacts. And then, as I was watching the dancing with some of the other single guys—the department-store heiress was wearing a little black dress with a fur-trimmed neckline that none of us could take our eyes off—one of them said, apropos the groom, “Well, he got what he wanted.”

“What do you mean?” I said, looking over to where the newly married man, a big grin on his face, was shaking hands with some of his father-in-law’s friends—cool, confident men who looked like they knew where all the levers were. “He’s on the inside,” came the reply. “He’s been working on this for years.” My friend, it was true, was not of that world. He had grown up in the South, a professional’s son but the grandson of a state trooper, and his mother had been a stewardess. He had gradually worked his way up the chain of academic prestige, through college and graduate school, always traveling in a northeasterly direction, then came to the city, moving from job to job in the same fashion. But I had never imagined that the whole thing had been so calculated.

Sure, I knew in a theoretical sense that people sometimes married for money. I had read The Great Gatsby and understood about coming to New York to bury your past and bluff your way into high society. But I had never dreamed that any of those things applied to my friends. Didn’t we all just go out with people because we liked them? Weren’t we going to marry for love? A phrase popped into my head, understood as if for the first time: “social climber.” And then I remembered something that my friend had said not long after I had met his girlfriend. The two of them had wanted to set me up with one of those old schoolmates of hers, but they had had their reservations. “She’s high-maintenance,” they said. “What’s high-maintenance?” I asked. (I hadn’t seen When Harry Met Sally . . . yet.) “High-maintenance is the worst,” my friend said, searching for a way to express the true awfulness of the concept. “It’s worse than being ugly. It’s worse than being poor!”

It’s funny how that hadn’t really hit me at the time—or had, but I had let it go.

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