Skinny Island

Skinny Island by Louis Auchincloss Page A

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Authors: Louis Auchincloss
Tags: General Fiction
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don't want him to cut any classes at Stanford. The draft only defers him while he's in school, and his marks have not been all they should be."
    "The draft! Horrors. How close it all makes you seem to the war. But, of course, you're right. Bert mustn't fight for an old, decayed civilization. He's so
American
, Bert." Elaine wondered what her only grandchild looked like now. She had not seen him in three years. He had been a nice enough boy, but short and stout and, she was afraid, dull. "Yes," she mused, "what has Bert to do with all that? His life is
here.
His future is here." The memory of the Windsors' fleeing Rolls jarred suddenly upon her mental vision. What an idle life she had led! What a waste. What trivial occupations. And poor, awkward, unlovely Bert should die for all
that
? "Do you know, Suzannah, I think I'll look into this thing of yours. What do you call it? America First?"
    "Oh, Mother, that would be so wonderful!"

    Elaine did not find her tasks, when she took up the isolationist cause the following week, very demanding. She went to the large office leased by Suzannah's organization from a bank on Madison Avenue and helped to draft responses to letters inquiring about its goals. She was given a good deal to read, mostly in the form of newspaper and magazine articles. Elaine had never taken much interest in public affairs, but she had tended to take for granted, like most of her fellow expatriates, that America should oppose the Axis powers, even at the risk of war. Now, however, reading this new material with what she hoped was more an open than an empty mind, she found some of it rather persuasive. Mightn't it be better to let Germany win a round once in a while rather than having to send troops to Europe
every
twenty-five years?
    But the real issue for her was Suzie. Here at last was something she could do for Suzie to make up for having been an indifferent parent. For the whole painful business of her repatriation had taught her to face up to her own deficiencies, at least in the maternal department. And poor Suzie had always been such an angel to her! Never once complaining about being made to feel a dowdy and unwanted child. She would come now into her mother's tiny office two or three times in a morning (Elaine worked only in the mornings) to ask what she was reading and then hug her and cry: "Oh, Mummy, it's such
fun
our being together in all this!"
    Suzie's intense preoccupation with her immediate family, Elaine decided, had to explain her attitude towards the war. For if Suzie adored her mother, she adored her son Bert even more. Bert must be kept alive, no matter what happened to the boundaries of Europe. And wasn't it possible, Elaine wondered, that Bert might have been as cool a son as his grandame has been a mother? Why had he gone so far away to college if not to escape the tightness of Suzie's embraces? Suzie had always been determined to have a loving family around her, even if she had to create it out of the fevered workings of her own imagination. Had her father come back to earth, he would no doubt have been smothered with kisses and put to work in America First.
    As Elaine's social life since her return to New York had been largely circumscribed by her daughter's, she had had little occasion to encounter the opposition in what was left of the old world of her friends and cousins to the cause she was now promoting. But one day, when she had decided for a change to lunch at the Colony Club, and was walking to a quiet corner of the members' dining room, she happened to pass a table at which some of her old acquaintances were seated, one of whom she instantly recognized as the recently arrived Marquise de Monrives, born Adelaide Stutz of Pittsburgh. Elaine particularly disliked Adelaide because of her appropriation, many years before, of Rex Anders, whom Adelaide had been willing to treat with far greater warmth, and she was disgusted to see her rival now, bloated, huge, with a choker of rubies

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