The Friend of Women and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss Page A

mother needs, it was made very clear to her that she was expected to continue the unvarying schedule of dinner parties and sporting weekends that Ralph’s Racket Club friends and their fashionable wives arranged as their refuge from any lives differing from their own. He also had a demanding and domineering old mother who expected a daughter-in-law to be constantly at her beck and call. Ralph must have been looking for an Oriental bride of complete submissiveness and thought he had found her in that lonely corner of her mother’s salon. He should have foreseen that even the most passive have their moments.
    I was present at an early tiff between the Larkins. I had been asked to dinner—just the three of us, in the third year of their union, during the brief period when Ralph had approved of me as a possible restraining influence on his spouse. This period did not last after he discovered that not only could I not play that role, but neither could anyone else. Cora, at the table, had asked me to support her in her expressed wish to spend the approaching summer in a villa that she proposed to rent in the south of France rather than in Southampton. Ralph had countered with his reasons for opposing her project. His tone was measured and gravelly, but not condemnatory. He evidently expected to prevail.
    â€œWhy should I wish to abandon my comfortable cottage with its well-trained staff, my sailboat, and my golf, to traipse about Europe and see palaces and cathedrals I’ve seen a dozen times before? Cora had a honeymoon there of two whole months. That should last any sensible woman for a few years at least.”
    â€œBut we spent all last summer on Long Island,” Cora protested. “And saw all the same people week after week. You’ve seen what it’s like there, Hubert. We give a dinner of twenty one night, and the following night we meet the same twenty people at our next-door neighbors’. And they always talk about the same things! They never get tired of it, never can have too much of it. But, oh, I can!”
    â€œI am sorry my friends don’t meet your lofty intellectual standards,” Ralph retorted coldly. “And that you will have to postpone your plans to scale Mount Olympus, at least for this summer. The house is being readied for us now, and I plan that we be there by June fifteenth.”
    â€œOh, Hubert, do speak to him,” Cora cried. “Tell him what
you
think of all those ghastly cocktail parties you had to go to when Alfreda had you down for that weekend.”
    â€œWhy couldn’t you do both?” I asked cautiously, turning to my host. “Why not take a jaunt to France in late June and then spend the balance of the summer on Long Island?”
    â€œBecause my plans have already been made, thank you” was his short rejoinder. My suggestion had not been relished.
    â€œWell, I’ll go anyway!” Cora declared. “You can have the house to yourself and entertain your head off!”
    â€œI’ll be interested to know how you plan to pay for your trip and rental in Provence.”
    With this he rose and left the dining room. Cora, in a rush of harsh words now explained what his last remark entailed. Ralph maintained a stiff control over their exchequer. He paid all her bills that he approved and gave her a moderate allowance for daily cash expenses, but whenever he disapproved of an item, she had to pay for it out of her own exiguous income, and that was already used up for the year. Summer travel, for that summer anyway, was out of the question.
    â€œYou could borrow, I suppose,” I suggested weakly.
    â€œHe’s quite capable of publishing a statement that he will not be responsible for my debts.”
    â€œOh, Cora, surely you exaggerate!”
    â€œYou don’t know him, Hubert!”
    That spat, alas, was the opening gunfire of a war that would last for some three years. I hardly saw Cora more than a half dozen