The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Popes in the seventeenth century were in some ways very broad-minded. As to what things popes were allowed to say. Then you would agree that the cardinal had much to answer for?”

  “I suppose he did his best, sir.”

  “For mankind? Or for France?”

  “Oh for France, sir. That was his duty, wasn’t it? To his king?”

  The headmaster’s deep brown eyes here fixed on Abercrombie for a moment of silent reverie. “Evidently he thought so. Do you know what he said on his deathbed?”

  “No, sir, it wasn’t . . .”

  “In the lesson. I am aware of that. But I will tell you. He was asked if he had forgiven his enemies. ‘I have none,’ came the serene reply, ‘but those of France.’ The man who has been called the architect of modern Europe was evidently satisfied with his handiwork. Think of that, Abercrombie!”

  “Shouldn’t he have been, sir?”

  “I see, Abercrombie, that you are not in a speculative mood. Let us return to the letter of the lesson where you may feel more at ease. What was Richelieu’s policy in the Thirty Years’ War?”

  “To support the Protestant cause, sir.”

  “You astound me, Abercrombie. I had thought he was a prince of the Roman Church.”

  “He was, sir. That’s why he had to do it secretly. Sometimes he helped the Catholics, too. He had to keep the civil war going in Germany as long as he could.”

  “Had to, Abercrombie?”

  “Yes, sir. To weaken the power of the Hapsburg alliance.”

  “Do you think that was ethical, Abercrombie?”

  “It worked, sir!”

  Dr. Prescott laughed cheerfully now. “What a pragmatist we have in our midst! Does it mean nothing to you, Abercrombie, that millions may have died to effectuate that policy?”

  “But not millions of Frenchmen, sir. Richelieu made France the first power in Europe. It wasn’t his fault if people in other countries were stupid enough to fight about religion.”

  “And would it have been the duty of the British government during our own civil war to support both sides to prolong the conflict?”

  “Perhaps that was different, sir.”

  “Why? We were stupid enough to fight about slavery, weren’t we?”

  “Very well then, sir, perhaps it might have been Britain’s duty. From Britain’s point of view.”

  “Bravo, Abercrombie! You have the courage to be consistent. I don’t know that I agree with your ethics, but I concede they might have been those of my old master at Balliol, a most esteemed scholar. They are certainly those of the political world. But let me put you one more question. A general question, Abercrombie, having nothing to do with marks or lessons. As you look abroad today at a Europe in flames, created by just such policies as Richelieu’s, does it not occur to you that the cardinal’s inspiration may have been something less than divine?”

  “Perhaps, sir. Yes, sir.”

  “Thank you, Abercrombie. I guess I made it sufficiently clear what answer I wanted.”

  April 2, 1941. I had an experience today which may have been a reminder of my “call.” It has certainly added to the little store of material in this folder and restimulated my zeal as a recorder. But before relating what happened I must briefly describe Mr. David Griscam, chairman of the Justin trustees. He has not appeared in these pages before as I had not thought him of such significance in Dr. Prescott’s life. His appearance is deceptive.

  He is reputed to be a very good friend of the school. He was taken into Justin early in its history as the penniless child of an absconded financier and has ever since rather lavishly demonstrated his gratitude. Despite a brilliant career at the New York bar, a wealthy marriage and two minor ambassadorships, Justin, according to the all-knowing Ives, has always remained his primary interest. But he does not believe that a trustee’s function is simply to raise money, nor does he always behave with the subservience that Dr. Prescott has come to expect from his board. Or rather, according to Mr. Ives, he may behave with subservience at Justin but acts otherwise when he gets back to New York. He has distinct ideas of his own, and they are not always the headmaster’s.

  Certainly, at least, he looks acquiescent. That is what first put me off. He makes a great fuss over Dr. Prescott, who doesn’t like to be made a fuss over. I suspect Mr. Griscam of being one of those outwardly deferring, inwardly resisting men who care more about the fuss they’re making than how it is received. He is of middling stature, with a good head of smooth grey hair, tranquil grey eyes and what he must consider, from the way he keeps turning his profile to the viewer, an aristocratic Roman nose. Everything about him, however, suggests to me the small man who would like to seem larger, the guest who is trying to look like one of the portraits in the club. I do not mean to be uncharitable, but Mr. Griscam is a most enigmatic character.

  This afternoon I met him and Dr. Prescott walking back from the river. I nodded respectfully as they were about to pass, but the headmaster reached out and caught my arm.

  “Come, Brian, and join two old men who are bored with each other’s company. We’ll have a look at the baseball and then have some tea.”

  His firm grip admitted of no refusal, and I obediently joined them. The headmaster was in a curious mood. He was joking, but his jokes were very dry, like his inclusion of Mr. Griscam, who must have been fifteen years his junior, in the term “two old men.”

  “I have never much cared for baseball,” Dr. Prescott continued as we walked, “but that’s my generation. I detest all the chatter. Football is my sport, a clean, silent game.” As we crossed to a little summit overlooking the diamond, we passed two boys with tennis rackets coming from the courts in back. “Oh, yes, I allow the fifth and sixth forms to elect tennis now,” he said, noting Mr. Griscam’s stare, “so long as some of them feel they cannot stomach baseball or crew. You see, David, there is no end to my broadmindedness! Despite my great age and imminent retirement I continue, as they say in magazine fiction, to ‘grow.’”

  “Who persuaded you of that? You used to call tennis a game for mollycoddles.”

  “This young man here.”

  “Aspinwall?” I felt the prick of Mr. Griscam’s quick suspicious stare.

  “None other. Oh, he is quite transforming me. He is my Father Joseph or my Colonel House. Or my John Brown, depending on the point of view.”

  Mr. Griscam smiled at the picture of me as Queen Victoria’s gilly. “Does he spike your tea with whiskey?” he asked.

  “No, Brian is too pure. In fact, I may have to spike his.” Dr. Prescott paused for a moment as we watched the baseball. “He made a persuasive argument that it might be as developing to a boy’s character to stand out against organized sports as to play them. That it takes courage to be a mollycoddle!” He turned on me now in a sudden quixotic reaction against the very argument by which he had allowed himself to be persuaded. “Perhaps we have reached the point where we must talk of courage in such terms. Perhaps it does take guts to face a frown, a sneer, a clatter of teacups. There was a time when it took courage to have one’s tongue branded or one’s ears shorn off or to be broken on a wheel. Don’t tell me physical courage isn’t the greatest!” He walked away abruptly from the diamond, and as we followed him, I heard him mutter: “The war will teach our young men that. Oh, yes, alas, it will.”

  Mr. Griscam asked where we were going.

  “To tea, of course. Or whiskey. Whichever you want. I can see you have no eye for baseball. There’s only one subject on your mind. Prize Day.”

  We had tea in a corner of the square study from whose wide west window one could see across the campus to the chapel. The twelve Caesars occupied niches in three walls covered from floor to ceiling with books. Since his wife’s death Dr. Prescott never uses the living room or parlor except for large occasions. Mr. Griscam began talking of plans for Prize Day. He said it should be celebrated as a jubilee and not a leave-taking.

  “I’d like to see it as a day of thanksgiving, Fran
k,” he explained earnestly, “with as many graduates coming back as can be accommodated. A thanksgiving for Francis Prescott. We could run buses down from Boston. I know all the trustees feel it should be an ovation to your fifty-five years in office.”

  “You see what they’re trying to do to me, Brian?” Dr. Prescott demanded with a wry smile. “They’re trying to bury me with praise. To mummify me with laudation. In the next months, or years if I am spared, I shall be choked with testimonials. I’ll become like a bad marble statue in a public park with puckered brow and those wrinkled trousers that the Victorian sculptors used to carve so lovingly. Ugh! If I live to be ninety I may catch a whiff of the same kind of horror that Wendell Holmes went through. I may even get to like it. That’s the worst of it.”

  “But it won’t be like that, Frank. It will be a simple ceremony, deeply felt.”

  “Don’t tell me what those things are like, David. I’ve spent my life attending them. I do not wish this Prize Day to be different from any other Prize Day. When I go, I go. That’s all there is to it. Is that understood?”

  Poor Mr. Griscam looked crestfallen. “But we’ve made such plans, Frank. You mean it’s really no?”

  “I mean it’s really no.” Dr. Prescott allowed his lips to crease into the briefest smile. “I’ve always said that if a headmaster’s vocabulary were limited to a single word, he might still get by with ‘no.’” And then he added, as if with a sense at last that he might have been too rough: “Besides, I’m not really leaving Justin. I’ve rented the Andrews cottage just down the road.”

  “Oh, have you?” Mr. Griscam asked. “I didn’t know that.”

  “I suppose I am entitled to select my own place of abode,” Dr. Prescott said dryly. “After my retirement, of course.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting the contrary.”

  “But you don’t approve?”

  “Did you expect I would? Is it fair to Duncan Moore?”

  “Well, he must learn to put up with it!” Dr. Prescott rose now and paced heavily across the room. “There’s got to be some limit to what’s demanded of the old. We have to step down when we still feel able to go on. We have to keep out of the way of our children. We have to avoid embarrassing youth with the reminder of what it will come to.”

  “Don’t I know!”

  “Pshaw, you’re a child, David. Sixty-five, isn’t that it? Besides, you have a pot full of money. That’s the only way to be respected by the young in this country.”

  “It isn’t a question of age,” Mr. Griscam insisted. “It’s a question of you. You don’t realize the force of your personality. How can Duncan Moore be anything while you’re still here?”

  The headmaster seemed now to regret that he had mentioned the matter. There was almost a coaxing note in his voice. “You’ll see, David. In my little house I’ll be no more trouble than if it were my grave. Anyway, I’ve already signed the lease. And all three girls approve. I shan’t, at any rate, be inflicting myself on them. With or without my hundred knights.”

  Mr. Griscam obviously saw that further argument would be vain. “Well I didn’t come to advise you about your retirement, Frank. I didn’t even come, despite what you say, to praise you. I came to . . .”

  “Bury me?” Dr. Prescott sat down again at the table and, raising his cup to his lips, drank off half of it rather noisily. “Have the trustees asked you to commission a fitting mausoleum?”

  “Nobody has asked me to do anything. This is entirely my own project.” Mr. Griscam paused, and my heart jumped when he proceeded to say exactly what I had divined that he was going to say. “I want to write your life.”

  “Great Scott, man!” Dr. Prescott exclaimed, putting down his cup with a clatter. “Is Griscam on Inter-Vivos Trusts to become Griscam on Prescott?”

  “I’ve known you since I was a child,” the chairman continued stubbornly. “I’m one of your earliest graduates, and I’ve been a trustee of the school longer than anyone. Who else is more qualified? Can’t I have a try at it?”

  “A try? How on earth can I stop you?”

  “By asking me to stop.”

  The headmaster shook his head impatiently. “I should not dream of giving so small a matter the dignity of a refusal. You may do as you choose.”

  “But would you cooperate?”

  “How?”

  “By talking to me about your life with some degree of candor?”

  “Never!”

  “Then how am I to do it?”

  “That’s your problem. Do you think I will voluntarily assist at my own Stracheyfication?” Dr. Prescott’s tone was sharply mocking again. “Do you think I want posterity to know all my foibles through the probing lawyer’s eye of David Griscam? No, if you must write a book about me, why not do it in the great Victorian tradition of the two-volume life and letters? With plates of bad portraits covered with onion skin and an index listing my characteristics, such as courage, magnanimity, foresight, judgment, prudence, and so forth?”

  “Who would read it?”

  “I would! If I have lived only to be your subject, David, and you only to be my biographer, why shouldn’t we both get some fun out of it?”

  “Let’s talk of something else,” Mr. Griscam said with a sigh. “You’re obviously not in a mood for this today.”

  “No doubt you’ll find Duncan Moore an easier headmaster to handle.”

  I was suddenly sorry for Mr. Griscam. Dr. Prescott’s gibes glanced off me as they drove home into his poor trustee who now said in a voice that trembled: “You know how much of my life you’ve been, Frank. It’s bad taste to pretend I won’t regret you.”

  But he should have known that Dr. Prescott was an old hand in dousing sentiment. “That’s just why I’m staying!” he cried remorselessly. “That’s why I’m taking the Andrews house.”

  I got up as I heard the “outside” tolling the end of afternoon sports and excused myself to get ready for the Lawrence House study period. Not since my first month at Justin Martyr had I been happy to leave the headmaster’s presence. I would not have believed that he could be cruel.

  I had not, however, heard the end of it. Tonight, as I was walking down my darkened dormitory after bidding the boys good night and switching off the overhead lights, I saw ahead through the open door to my study that I had no less a visitor than Mr. Griscam himself. He was standing with his back to the doorway, studying the little portrait of Samuel Richardson which hangs over the mantel. This is my one great treasure, given me on my twenty-first birthday by Mother and Father. Painted on copper, it depicts the father of the English novel at the height of his glory, with a seraphic smile on his serene, round face and a black velvet cap on his bald head, holding a manuscript on a board stiffly out before him.

  “Which one do you suppose he’s writing?” Mr. Griscam asked, without turning, when he heard my step. A frequent visitor, he is at home anywhere in the school.

  “Oh, Clarissa,” I exclaimed. “At least, that’s what I like to think.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be undergoing many of the pangs of creation.”

  “But should he? Shouldn’t the man who’s writing the greatest of English novels beam?”

  “Clarissa!” He turned to me now, and his smile, if disbelieving, was kindly. “Is it really that?”

  “Well, to me it is. I don’t think anyone else could have written so wonderfully about a villain without, deep down, admiring him. The way Milton admires Satan. But I feel Richardson detests Lovelace.”

  “You don’t think he envies him a bit?”

  “Oh, no!” But now at last I pulled myself together. “What am I thinking of, Mr. Ambassador? Won’t you sit down?”

  “Please don’t call me ‘Mr. Ambassador,’” he replied as he settled himself in the armchair by my desk and pulled out his pipe. “I no longer am one, and, besides, Panama is a very small country. I hope you don’t mind my popping in on you?”

  “I’m most honored.” As he filled his pipe, I continued, a bit cons
trainedly: “But you read Richardson? You like him?”

  “I know that note of surprise,” he answered with a chuckle. “English teachers are always shocked to find that Wall Street can be literate. You think of us as bullying sparrows who peck canaries to death because we cannot sing. As men who may collect but who never read.”

  “I’m sure you must do both.”

  “Oh, I’ve picked up a few nice things. Especially in the Elizabethans whom Dr. Prescott tells me you admire. To me they’re all gold and ebony. They light up the sky of our grey world. Don’t you find it so?”

  I think it was at this point that I began to have a glimmer of sympathy for Dr. Prescott’s disputatiousness with the chairman of his board. There is something about Mr. Griscam that makes one want to take issue with him. It may be the implication in his tone that it is a higher thing for him, a busy man of affairs, to have discovered literature than for a poor teacher. Yet his words imply humility. “I find I don’t believe in the things they believed in,” I replied. “I don’t see it’s so vitally important for women to be chaste. I mean so much more important than anything else. And I don’t think it’s so terrible to die. Why were they so obsessed with symbols of transiency: grinning skulls and graveyards? I know we have only a few petty moments of mortal time, and I think it’s quite enough.”

  Mr. Griscam nodded his head slowly as he seemed to consider this, as I am sure he always considered everything. “Don’t you think Frank Prescott is a bit of an Elizabethan?” he asked. “Not, of course, that Harriet was not chaste.” He smiled, and I objected to his smile, even while I speculated that he might be one of those unfortunate persons who always say the wrong thing when they mean to be kind. It would not be so much that he lacked heart as that he feared that he lacked it. “Frank has a bitter sense of mortality,” he continued. “He can be as gloomy as Hamlet when the mood seizes him.”

  “Yet he has faith,” I protested.

  “Oh, yes, he has faith. It’s his keel. No matter how much rumbling and tossing about he does, you can be sure he’ll always straighten up in the end. Sometimes I wonder if he doesn’t put on the show just to give us a scare.”