Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss

rail from the heart of the great city, where my father went daily to his stock exchange firm, except in his vacation month of August, which he devoted to golf. Our house, at the end of a dead-end street called Breezy Way, was a large white-shingle affair, called the Bray, because it had once boasted stables, and was separated from the sea by a wide marshland on which it was my delight to take lonely rambles. Far enough out in it, amid the numberless muddy inlets, the tall reed grass, the impenetrable sedge and the rushes, one felt a world away from the distant and barely visible cottages in a manless territory of seagulls, terns, sandpipers, frogs, muskrats and herons. It was here that I indulged in daydreams fraught with romantic fluff, unsullied by any of the stern practicalities of home.
    I was not an only child but an only son; my sole sibling was my older sister, Edith, ever preoccupied with the social life of her contemporaries, who would never set a dainty foot on the muddy trail of the marshes. My father, rotund but athletic, hearty and well-meaning, but possessed of few interests beyond his stocks and his golf, was seemingly content in his marriage to my much more competent mother, a handsome, practical, socially minded woman, an excellent
mâitresse de maison,
who managed him as easily as she did the first families of the neighborhood who flocked to Breezy Way as to a natural leader.
    I always felt that I was a distinct disappointment to both of my parents, as I was not good-looking, athletic or gregarious, and cared only for such passive activities as reading or listening to music or writing poetry. I must admit, however, that Mother rarely showed the chagrin that she surely felt, and wisely constrained my father into accepting her policy of allowing me freedom to indulge my tastes, so long as I conformed to the minimum standard she felt was needed to adapt me to the practical world in which I one day would have to live. I saw that, by her worldly rules, she was being fair, and did my best to obtain decent grades in the New England boarding school to which I, reluctant, was sent and which I cordially disliked. After all, I still had the long Cedarhurst summers.
    The marshes were my other life; I may even say they were my real life. I learned to identify the most infrequently visiting warblers, and claimed to have sighted a prothonotary; I spotted the rare wood duck and once saw a bald eagle, our national bird, ignominiously chased by a smaller but fiercer osprey. Toward the middle of the summer most of our neighbors fled the heat for Maine or the Massachusetts shores, and there were no parties of young people that Mother could urge me to attend, so, taking a sandwich lunch and a volume of Keats or Shelley, I could pass the whole day alone. But one summer, when I was seventeen, another person appeared on the trails of the marshes, and this person, at first seen by me as an intruder, became my most valued friend. He was also, oddly enough, a stockbroker and a good friend of my parents.
    I say "oddly enough," as it would not have occurred to me that a member of my parents' circle would have any use for the marshes or for me, and particularly such a one as Arthur Slocum, trim and elegant, still in his early forties, and married to a rich, vivacious and twice previously married woman, Leopoldine, commonly known as Polly, some years his senior, who shared with my mother the social rule of our little community. But Mr. Slocum, as I was to call him until my college days, differed from the family friends in that he shared my love of rustic solitude and won my trust at our first meeting on the brambled path that led from Breezy Way to my haunts by asking me, with an appealing deference to my greater experience, whether I would be his guide through the rough trails of the marshes. I was happy to show him all my little discoveries, and it soon became our habit to roam together by the creeks and rushes on weekend