The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I wonder if the only difference between being ‘involved,’ as you see yourself, and being a spectator, as you see me, isn’t in the choice of seats. You want a box.”

  She considered this carefully, in all fairness to me. “All right, I want a box,” she agreed. “Boxholders, after all, can at least be decorative. They’re part of the show.”

  “Like a queen, you mean? In a royal box?”

  “Well, you put it very crudely. But, all right, if you must. Let’s say a queen.”

  “And will it just be you there? Will you be a virgin queen, all alone, or will there be a William for your Mary?”

  “Oh, there’ll be a William,” she answered, with a nod. “There will indeed be a William. I think I even visualize him.”

  “‘Divinely tall and most divinely fair’?”

  “He need be neither tall nor fair. It will be quite sufficient if his face shows character. I shall want him, of course, to have brains and imagination, and ambition, of a noble sort. He need not have money, but he should be able to make it if necessary. I have no wish for a dreamer or for a dry academic type. I want a man of intellect who is also a man of action.”

  “In other words,” I suggested with a smile, “a man who is capable of enjoying the success you expect him to achieve?”

  “Precisely. Am I presumptuous?”

  “Let’s say you’re optimistic. What fascinates me, Eliza, is that all the things you want are noble things, yet the mere fact of your wanting them is enough to make you . . . well, may I say the most charming of materialists?”

  “You may say a materialist. I make no bones about being a materialist.” Indeed, it occurred to me, glancing at that fine profile between the chinchilla hat and the chinchilla neckpiece that she was the portrait of what she professed to be. “But it’s only fair to myself to add that I consider us all materialists. What do we have to choose from but material? The question is: do we pick the good or the shoddy?”

  “Who are your candidates?”

  Eliza laughed her loud, smooth clear laugh. It was a remarkable laugh for a woman, so assured and resonant, so chuckling, with just a hint of scorn that was somehow not in the least wounding. I think it was her laugh that made me almost love her. It seemed to warn you that its owner could take you over, but that you might be better off taken over. “You don’t expect me to tell you that, do you?” she demanded. “Who are yours? Do you have a man to meet my high requirements?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do. You seemed just now to be sketching his likeness.”

  “Fancy! Do I know him?”

  “You’ve never mentioned him, so I assume you don’t.”

  “Oh, Horace, who?”

  “I don’t think I’m going to tell you. You’d simply grab him, and I may want to keep him for myself.”

  “Dog in the manger! You can’t marry him.”

  “True. Perhaps the woman has the greater right. But I’m a very selfish person. I don’t always regard greater rights.”

  “What an odious pig you are, if I may change my metaphor. You’d better hide your friend very carefully, then, because I warn you, I shall now be on the watch!”

  And she was. Nothing could have whetted her curiosity more than my refusal to give her Frank’s name. It was comic to watch her maneuvers and machinations, and the pleasure of it came near to compensating me for the realization—one might almost say the prognostication—that she would, of course, meet Frank and capture him. It was much more likely in the smaller New York society of that time than it would have been today. In fact, it was almost inevitable that two young people who dined out as frequently as Frank and Eliza did should ultimately meet. When Eliza discovered one night that her handsome dinner partner was a Balliol man and a friend of Horace Havistock’s, the fat was in the fire. As I learned later from Frank himself, she had burst into her vigorous laugh and exclaimed, to his astonishment and mystification: “So it is you, at last! Could Horace have planned it this way?”

  With him it was a case of love at first sight; with her, of love at first foresight. I assumed uncomfortably that my poor personality had been the kindling to set off the torrid blaze of their initial conversations, but I daresay I was soon consumed. I do not mean that they tore me to pieces, but I am sure that they laughed over my foibles and agreed that I was as spoiled as a pampered kitten. And worse, far worse, whether the idea was ever actually articulated or not, there must have been in the air between them the contrast between the puny baby of friendship that I offered to each and the full grown, wonderful glory of the kind of thing that they offered each other. Oh, yes, they made a beautiful couple, Frank and Eliza, Gibson boy and Gibson girl, standing like newlyweds in an insurance poster to represent all the brave new things that life seemed to offer. I could not help but be a bit disgruntled; the sexual happiness of others has always an excluding effect.

  Frank had first called at Number 310 in an agony of embarrassment, stomping about my third-floor sitting room with darkened countenance, until he had finally managed to stop and blurt out: “Do you care for her?” When he had been assured that I did not, at least not in the sense that he meant, I had been royally and painfully thumped on the back and hugged. Poor fellow, he had been planning to leave New York to get out of my way if he had found that I was courting Eliza, and I believe he would have done so.

  But touched as I was by the loyalty and integrity of my friend, I did not find his companionship in the months that followed very stimulating. He was a greater bore on the subject of Eliza than he had ever been on his school, for he assumed that I, as her friend and intimate, was as interested as he in her greater glorification. Did I know that she had the good taste to prefer German to Italian opera? Was I aware that she was an expert horsewoman? Had I ever encountered such a natural generosity of heart or a mind so cultivated and yet so unspoiled? Was she not head and shoulders above the simpering ninnies who cowered behind their growling mammas and waited for some ass of a moneybag to propose?

  “It’s uncanny, Horace,” he would always end. “I never dreamed that I would meet a girl so close to my ideal. Do you realize that she’s simply—perfect?”

  It was even harder on me to be subjected to the same kind of confidences from Eliza. Never have I known a couple who seemed so uncritically enthusiastic about each other, and the remarkable thing was that their enthusiasm seemed to wax with better acquaintance. I understood it with Frank, for at this period of his life, or rather just prior to his meeting Eliza, he had been showing an increasing taste for extremes. He had talked about giving up his job for the Fiji Islands; he had written reams of florid poetry that made very little sense, and he had filled a sketchbook with pictures of the most grotesque monsters. I discovered that he even spent his Sundays at the city hospitals, reading to patients. It was all perfectly all right, but a bit quixotic, a bit bizarre. Eliza, on the other hand, for all her capacity for excitement, had a very level head. I suspected her of puffing her feelings and demonstrations a bit, and this irritated me.

  “It’s all very well to deify Frank,” I told her one afternoon in the Park, “but sooner or later we have to let him drift back down to earth. Granted that he has brilliant gifts, but what has he done with them? What is he so far but a young man at Central who isn’t even engaged to a Vanderbilt?”

  “He’s engaged to me.”

  “Is he? Since when?”

  “Since yesterday.”

  “Well, congratulations! Has your father consented?”

  “Oh, I haven’t even asked Father. I’m my own mistress, you know. Father’s living on an annuity. When he gave me what little I have, he said: ‘Here it is, Liza. There ain’t going to be no more. You’re on your own now, my gal, and make the most of it.’”

  “I trust he gave you enough.”

  “How much do you think?”

  I calculated rapidly for a minute and then made a shrewd guess. Eliza burst into her high laugh. “Really, Horace, you old New Yorkers are beyond anything!
Where do you get that financial sixth sense?”

  “You mean I was right?”

  “A bull’s-eye! But how did you know? I thought I was supposed to be rich.” She shrugged her disdain of such things. “Anyway, we won’t starve. Frank’s going to get ahead in Central. Mr. Depew told me so himself. And he can go from there to anything. The state legislature, congress, an ambassadorship. Oh, you’ll see, Horace. Frank may need a little pushing, but look who he’s got to push him!”

  “He’s an unpredictable man,” I said grudgingly.

  “That’s exactly the excitement! But don’t you see, with the talents he has, where can he go but up?”

  “Do you know he once wanted to be a minister?”

  “Of course. And a schoolteacher. And what a good one he’d have been. But he’s left all that behind.”

  “Yes,” I said with a little sigh. “He seems to have left it all a good ways behind.”

  I believed it when I said it. Afterwards, Eliza always thought that I must have suspected something, and she never forgave me for not giving her an earlier warning. But I could not have. I had reconciled myself completely to the idea of Frank as a railroad man. I had fully accepted the notion that the aspirations of his days at St. Andrew’s had been mere adolescent religiosity. Frank, to my mind, had simply reverted to the tradition of his family, as I was reverting to that of mine.

  But, indeed, his exhilaration of that period was by no means all love. Love seemed to have been rather the catalytic agent that had started the vibrations of every emotional chord in his being, vibrations that boded to be powerful enough to survive even the removal of the agent itself. I made this all-important discovery one night after a dinner meeting of the Hone Club at our house, where Frank and I were guests. After the last of the old boys had left and I had escorted Father to his bedroom, I was very tired, but Frank, who was never tired himself and did not understand the condition in others, suggested that we have a drink of whiskey before he left. I told him flatly that I wanted to go to bed, but he did not even hear me. He was standing by the long table where Father kept his newspapers, turning the pages of one in sheer nervous activity. This was unlike him, as was the odd little feverish glitter in his eye, and I was suddenly attentive.

  “Have you something to tell me?”

  He did not turn. “Yes.”

  “About Eliza?”

  “No. I mean yes. Yes, in the sense that nothing happens to me that doesn’t concern Eliza.”

  “Something nice?”

  “Something that you would call ‘charming.’” He turned around with a smile that I can only describe as radiant. No other adjective would fit it. “I’ve found my old faith again. I’m going to Boston to see Phillips Brooks on Saturday. He thinks he can get me into divinity school in a month’s time.”

  At this I went to the sideboard to pour myself a generous helping of whiskey. It would mean a terrible headache in the morning, but that no longer mattered. I sat on the sofa, tucked my feet under me, and simply murmured: “Tell.”

  Frank walked about the room as he told me of his reconversion, his voice jagged with a tense excitement, his hands straying over the surface of tables, tapping books and bronzes, his shiny eyes roving and not seeming quite to take me in when they rested on me. I did not move, except when I took a discreet sip of my drink, nor did I speak, even when he paused for a possible comment. His monologue went something like this:

  “I’ve even had a vision, a visitation, whatever you want to call it. I know that sounds like the most incredible arrogance or the most incredible naïveté—perhaps both—but I don’t care. I’m way beyond caring! It didn’t happen to me without preparation, as it happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Oh, no, I was prepared. Only the stubbornest kind of ass could have resisted so much preparation for so long. For, you see, Horace, there’s something you don’t know about me, something I haven’t told a soul. Not even Eliza, at least till the other day. And that is that even after I lost my faith in Oxford, I’ve never stopped reading the New Testament and the early fathers. In the past year I’ve read the gospels every night when I came in for two or three hours, in Latin, in Greek, even in French, trying to approach them freshly. Do you know, I can recite Matthew right through? Don’t worry, I shan’t.

  “All I’m really trying to tell you is that the figure of Christ became consistent to me. He is the same in all the gospels. Indeed, he is the only thing that is. Verses began to ring in my ears at odd times during the day at the office. ‘Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is God.’ ‘The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do.’ ‘For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.’

  “Oh, yes, Horace, it is divinely assured selflessness. The selflessness that comes from an absolute knowledge that the praise or scorn of the world is a total irrelevance. The mortal part of Jesus, the assumed shell of the Godhead, hardly exists in the gospels, except for a few twinges, the agony in the garden, the cry from the cross. And even here, in Christ’s passion, it is the pain of the Father over what men are doing to his son and hence to themsleves. It is the rejection, not the torture that concerns him. And I began to see that the discrepancies and oddities of the gospels are the discrepancies and oddities of mortal writers, mortal witnesses.”

  He paused here so long that I thought I had to say something. “Was that your vision?”

  “Oh, no.” He became even graver now. “My vision came a month ago, one night when I had not been able to sleep. I had lain awake, thinking about the passion, until almost dawn. I suppose you will say that I fell asleep, exhausted at last, and dreamed my vision. It doesn’t matter. It was equally real, awake or asleep. It was the sudden appearance by my bed of my father. No, not by my bed. He was somehow everywhere in the room, I can’t explain. He did not look like the daguerro-types that I have seen or like Aunt Jane’s miniature, yet I knew that it was he. He was very pale, haggard, perhaps unshaven, in uniform, and for some reason he had his left arm in a sling. He shook his head slowly at me and said in a reproachful voice—but, oh, the kindest, Horace, you ever heard, the very kindest!—‘Frank, my poor boy, how many times must you be told before you see?’”

  Here Frank, overwrought, dropped suddenly into a chair and covered his face with his hands. “To think I had to have a sign! To think I had to disturb my poor father’s spirit before I believed! To think I was worse than Saint Thomas!” His voice rose now to a pitch that made me apprehensive of hysteria. “Unless I could see the print of the nails and put my fingers into the print of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I would not believe. And Christ was as good to me as he was good to Thomas, his own apostle, and took my fingers and made me feel the print of the nails in his flesh and took my hand and thrust it into his side. Oh, Horace, if only I am spared long enough to make some return for that!”

  I felt at last that I had to pull him up. “Is there any reason to think that you won’t be? Do you interpret your vision as implying an early demise?”

  He looked startled for a minute, as if at hearing me talk at all. Then he smiled, his old smile, and he was Frank again. “No, of course not. And forgive me, old fellow, for running so off at the mouth. I’ve given you a dose of it, haven’t I? But that’s what friends are for. I had to tell somebody.”

  “Haven’t you told Eliza?”

  “Oh, yes. But not in quite such detail. Women hate the abstract, you know. The point she went straight to was my giving up Central to become a minister.”

  “I can imagine. And how did she take it?”

  “She was a brick, Horace. A perfect brick. Which I’m sure comes as no surprise to you.” He rose now, looking tired himself at last, and came over to put his hand on my shoulder. “It was a shock to her, of course. She hadn’t planned on being a minister’s wife, much less a schoolteacher’s. She broke down at first and actually wept. Oh, it was hard, I can tell you. But the next day she was much calmer. She said she
’d have to think it over while I was in Boston. But I have an instinct that she’s going to stick.”

  “No doubt she is readjusting her vision to include an archepiscopal palace.”

  “Now, Horace, don’t be mean. Go to bed and pray that she’ll stick. Can you imagine a more magnificent headmaster’s wife? And you know she’d love it when she really got into it!”

  “Yes,” I said bitterly. “I can see it all. Jo’s Boys.”

  At that he left me, good-natured enough to laugh, and I finished my drink, deriving a sour satisfaction by contemplating how wretchedly I was bound to feel in the morning.

  Eliza was cool and quiet the next time that she took me driving. She was as beautiful as ever, and everything she did, even pouting, she did with a natural grace, but it was evident that she was thwarted, terribly thwarted, and frustration is the hardest thing in the world for a woman to make attractive. When she did begin to talk, it was to question me closely on how long I had known of Frank’s state of mind.

  “Well, does it matter,” I finally put to her, with some impatience in my tone, “how much I guessed and when? I tell you it came as a complete surprise to me, and you won’t accept that. But the important thing is that Frank has found his faith again and is happy. Personally, I’m delighted.”

  “It’s all very well for you to say that. It doesn’t affect your future.”

  “On the contrary. If Frank ever starts his school, he may renew his old offer to me to be a master. It could change my whole life.”

  “You? A master?”

  “Well, why not?” I demanded, stung by her tone. “Do you think all masters have to be athletes? Do you think there are no sensitive boys who might profit by a cultivated teacher who cares more about art and literature than football? I know I might have been much less miserable at St. Andrew’s had there been a Horace Havistock on the faculty.”