Manhattan Monologues by Louis Auchincloss Page B

feel that you're alone with the poetess, inside her brain, so to speak? I guess what I'm trying to tell you, Tony, is not to be afraid of your isolation. You're happiest here on the marshes. Oh, don't deny it; it can be a great strength and will do you for courage if we get into another war. Not that you don't have courage anyway—of course you do. But freedom from your fellow men can be a resource. It reconciles you to the great black void of the universe where the end of animate life, as Walter Pater put it, is like the setting of a pale arctic sun over the dead level of a barren and lonely sea."
    I shuddered. "Is
that
such a comfort?"
    "The comfort is in the beauty of the expression."
    I sighed. "Well, maybe I'll come to see it."
    I was always aware of what to me was the anomaly of so serious a thinker as Mr. Slocum being on such congenial terms with my parents and, indeed, with all of their tightly knit affluent and mundane little groups of Cedarhurst summer residents and year-round commuters. Of course, though he was their intellectual superior, his charm and modesty, to say nothing of his skill as a polo player, enabled him to amuse and divert them without arousing the least jealousy or resentment. Oh, yes, that explained their liking of him well enough, but why was he so content to shine unrivaled in a group that, however friendly and well meaning, was never challenging or even critical? Was he lazy? Or simply desirous of avoiding contradiction or dispute?
    When I asked about this on our next meeting, he appeared to agree, if a bit ruefully, with my assessment of his choice of social life.
    "Well, you see, it's Polly's world, my wife's world, or, you might say,
the
world, which Polly somehow epitomizes. You know, the jolly world, full of laughter and fun and good spirits, and success. Yes, success is part of it, part of the
real
world."
    "And Mrs. Slocum represents all that?"
    "Well, say she represents the best part of it. She helps keep me alive. Out here on the marshes, she says, I lose myself. I am no longer me. I'm dissolved. There's nothing left of the corporeal Arthur Slocum."
    "Except his soul," I offered boldly.
    What I wanted to get at was the unique value he placed on solitude. It was as if that was where his soul existed. Of course he was not alone when he was with me as we trudged through the marshes, but I took it that he regarded me as somehow indigenous to the territory, like a tern or a gull, and therefore not an intruder on his privacy. And certainly on our peregrinations he was a different man from the one I observed at a Sunday lunch given by my family. There was little enough in common between the brooding observer of flora and fauna and the quoter of romantic verse, and the genial tippler at Mother's long table who would always laugh the loudest at his wife's jokes, and the desperately serious polo player who was constantly taking spills in showing off his dubious prowess to a spouse more absorbed in the gossip of her box in the stadium. But which was the man he really wanted to be?
    He responded now to my last remark about his soul.
    "That is one way of putting it, I suppose. But if the soul is stripped down to its essence, isn't that a state of death? And I want to live, don't I? Doesn't every man? Polly to me is life!"
    We trudged on in silence after this fervent exclamation, both a bit embarrassed by his outburst.
    "It must be wonderful to feel that way about one's spouse," I said at last. "How did you and she meet?"
    He was only too glad to reminisce. "It was five years ago at a polo match at Meadowbrook. Before the game I happened to walk by her box, and a mutual friend in it hailed me over. She was wearing a straw hat with an enormous brim, and as she turned to greet me, with a radiant smile that I supposed she gave any man lucky enough to be introduced, I was a goner. She was married at the time, Tony, but I knew I could wait for that woman forever if I had to! A man can get anything in