Read Online The Young Apollo and Other Stories by Louis Auchincloss - Free Book Online Page A

depression. I gave up seeing Tonio, writing him a check that was undoubtedly much too large but that utterly contented him. It was probably enough to allow him to marry the girlfriend of whose existence I had been faintly but uncomfortably aware. To avoid Silly and his importunate calls, I went to Siena and holed up in a hotel there. I had to recognize that I was in the grip of a major nervous breakdown.
    My patient then came back to New York, escorted by the solicitous Sylvester Seton, who had embraced the occasion for this act of compassion to make a long-due visit to his old and ailing parents, charging the first-class air travel there and back to Marvin's account. It was through Cynthia Fowler that Marvin, staying in her apartment, came to seek my professional services. He was now willing to submit himself to a lengthy psychoanalysis.
    He was with me twice a week, for one-hour sessions, for two years. He was an articulate and humble patient, even a charming one. I was perfectly clear from the start that my job would be to reconcile him to his homosexuality; he was far too deeply committed even to think of any alteration. My trouble—it sounds odd to say—lay in the fact that
intellectually
he saw nothing morally wrong with it. He was utterly free from popular or religious prejudice. With other patients, removing their intellectual doubts as to its morality can help, but he had no such hang-ups. His problem was that emotionally, deep, deep down, his inversion struck him as unpardonably wicked, even if he was in no way responsible for it. He was like an early Calvinist who believed that he might be damned through no fault of his own. God arbitrarily selected those who were to be saved and those who were not. Marvin's god, if that was his word for whatever force or demiurge created the universe, was entirely capable of saving Sylvester Seton and damning Marvin Daly for doing exactly the same thing. Heaven for him was Meadowview and Mother; hell was Florence and Tonio.
    But we made progress. He managed to crawl out from under the thick, stifling blanket of his depression, to look around at the world again, to purchase a brownstone for his residence, and to adjust himself, more or less, to a prosperous bachelor's life in New York. He couldn't return to Italy while he was undergoing my treatment, and he spent some of his copious supply of spare time putting together quite a fine art collection, mostly of French eighteenth-century paintings: Lancret, Pater, van Loo, and Hubert Robert. They probably suggested to him, particularly the last named, some of the grace, the ease, the delightfulness that he associated with his idealized memory of Meadowview.
    Nor did he feel required to live a chaste life, however sinful the alternative might be. I had at least liberated him from that. Through a friend of Silly's, he found himself invited to some all-male parties in Greenwich Village, and he engaged in a couple of discreet affairs. He could even be almost light-hearted about them. "You got the St. Luke's out of me, doctor," he told me laughingly once. "But after an operation as drastic as that, there was no question of my resuming a normal life. The best you could do was to sew me up and make me as comfortable as possible."
    In the dozen years that elapsed between his release from my care and his premature demise, I saw him only infrequently, when he suffered sharp returns of agitation. I really believe that had he gone back to Italy and taken up permanent residence there he might have had a happier and certainly a more productive life. There his past would have been absent and his present peopled with a friendly acquaintance to whom the sexual habits of a rich American were a matter of total indifference. But in New York he found himself increasingly adopting a hermit's life rather than mingling with the world of his family and old school friends, who were occupied with businesses and children and clubs and sports in which he