The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  I shivered suddenly with resentment. Who was this lawyer to condescend to Francis Prescott? Did he think we were his puppets, playing with little crucifixes and ideals up here in Justin Martyr?

  “You don’t like Dr. Prescott!”

  I could hardly believe that I had uttered the words, even while they were ringing in my astonished ears. Mr. Griscam, however, did not blink. He is too practiced an advocate not to take immediate advantage of a witness’s emotionalism.

  “It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?” he answered calmly. “All I know is that I worship him. I suppose it’s quite possible to dislike one’s god.”

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered, raising my fingers to my now burning cheeks. “I spoke too hastily. I had no right.”

  “You had every right, my dear fellow. Every right in the world. My trouble may be that having done a good many things for the school, I subconsciously expect more consideration than I get. And what is anything I’ve done compared to what Frank has done? Nothing. Frank is Justin Martyr.” He stared into the empty grate of my fireplace and nodded sadly. “Yes, I suppose it’s only too possible that I should resent Frank. Just as it’s only too painfully evident that he resents me.”

  “For the same reasons?”

  “Oh, there are many reasons for his resenting me. I won’t tell you all of them, but I’ll tell you one. Frank doesn’t like to face the fact that it takes diplomats as well as soldiers to win wars. Even holy wars. Talleyrands as well as Napoleons.”

  “And you’re his Talleyrand?”

  “In some ways. Of course, the world loves soldiers and hates diplomats.” He shrugged and then looked around at me with that curious little flare of defiance that I had noticed before. “But I’d like to see it get on without us! Frank knows that. Frank, of course, knows everything. But he wants his board of trustees to be like the scaffolding around an edifice under construction and to come off when the building is finished.” He suddenly spread his arms wide. “And there is Justin Martyr, bright, inviolate, a shining Valhalla in the sky! Well, I agree with him, that’s the funny thing. I make no bid for personal praise or glory. At least not consciously. I realize that the greatest diplomat, by definition, must be the one of whom nobody has heard. And that’s the way I would have written Frank’s life.”

  “Tell him so!”

  “He’d never believe it.” For the first time I heard the naked bitterness in his tone. “He’s too afraid that I’d make myself the real hero. But I wouldn’t have, Aspinwall. I swear I wouldn’t. I wanted to write that book. I wanted to write it more than I’ve wanted anything in years.”

  “You can still write it.”

  “Without his blessing? Would you?”

  “No. But you might wait until . . . until . . .”

  “Until he’s dead? He’ll never be dead for me. No, Aspinwall, I give it up. I give it up once and for all. It is you who must write the book.”

  “I?” My voice was a whisper. “But I’m not even a Justinian.”

  “That may be all to the good. There are those who would say: why should a young man who has known Prescott only as an octogenarian be the person to do his life? Yet I can see that maybe only such a person could do it. In any event, I don’t want to talk about it.” He rose from his chair and knocked the ashes out of the pipe that he had only so recently lit. “The whole subject is very painful, and I’m not going to keep you up talking about it. You will note that I have put an envelope on your desk. It contains my notes for the first two chapters of my life of Frank. It is yours to do with as you wish.”

  “But, Mr. Griscam,” I protested in distress, “what reason do you have to think I even contemplate such a project?”

  “Only that Horace Havistock told me he had given you his papers. I was terribly jealous for a bit. I had gone to see him in Westbury with the express purpose of raiding his desk. Ah, well.” He smiled and held out his hand. “It’s a job, anyway, for youth. For youth and faith.”

  No sooner had I taken his hand than he pulled it away and was gone. Obviously he did not trust to the durability of his own magnanimity. Had I had only myself to consider I would have hurried down the corridor after him and stuffed his manuscript into his pocket. But I had to consider that I might be only an agent. That I might not have the right to refuse.

  9

  David Griscam’s Notes

  A BIOGRAPHER should commence by stating his prejudices, if he knows of any, and I will undoubtedly antagonize my reader at the outset by affirming that I have none. “But you’re a lawyer!” he may object, to which I answer: “Exactly. But a good lawyer, such as I claim to be, must be without prejudice.”

  It seems hard to irritate one’s audience at the outset, but as I am bound to do it sooner or later I may as well have it over with. People don’t like my type. They resent the fact that I never raise my voice, that I am always reasonable, always willing to hear both sides. Because I am everybody’s trustee or on everybody’s board, because I have the gift of being able to get any old chestnut out of any old fire, people take for granted that I’m dull.

  I, in turn, resent this. I have tried all my life not to be narrow and stuffy. I believe I know as much about Elizabethan drama as any man living, short of the great scholars, and my collection, which I am leaving to Justin Martyr, is full of treasures. I have always been a staunch democrat in the very heart of republicanism, and under Franklin Roosevelt I served as assistant secretary of the Treasury and later as ambassador to Panama. I was enthusiastic for the New Deal when most of my friends were for laissez-faire, and as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Justin Martyr I consistently backed Dr. Prescott in every one of his great forward-looking steps. Yet my son Sylvester, a conservative bank vice-president, and my daughter Amy, who cast her first vote for Herbert Hoover, both regard me complacently as an old fogy. Emmaline, my wife, who has devoted her life to good works, is nearer the mark. She simply regards me as a hopeless materialist, which all of us, except Emmaline, basically are.

  I must stop before my introduction dwindles into an old man’s querulousness and state the essential prefatory things. I was the only child of a wretched marriage, born to the memory of wealth and the prospect of poverty. I cannot remember my father, Jules Griscam, but I have always been told that he was a dark, flamboyant, charming man, full of wit and brassy impudence, the contemporary picture of a villain and the opposite of myself. He dazzled the Joneses (Mother’s family and old New York) during the brief period of his success and dazzled my mother, who had never been dazzled before and never was to be again. After the collapse of his insurance company and the discovery of his peculations he fled to Argentina where, a few years later, he died, leaving to his widow and son a pile of debts which in those days it was considered a sacred duty to pay, so that I started life with a price on my head. Grandpa Jones took us into his old brownstone, full of black walnut and stained glass, paid for my upbringing and supported Mother, and to this day I have never been able to figure out how he was able to make us feel so keenly the load of our obligation without ever even hinting at it. It was a trick peculiar to the family, and I think in time I may have mastered it myself.

  Mother was that most irritating of females: the kind who believes implicitly and forever in her male progenitor. No wonder Father told her nothing of his business troubles! She minded the shock of his disaster mostly because of its jarring effect on Grandpa, and she lived thereafter a life of muted apology, acting more as a plain, submissive paid companion to the old man than as a daughter. Even as a child I resented her deference to Grandpa in his testy senility and to my uncles in their youthful arrogance. I wanted to be her champion and take her away from the eternally superior Joneses. I wanted to make a fortune and put her back on top of their world. But my dreams dissolved into slush before the hum of her constant admonitions: “Be sure to tiptoe when you go by Uncle Andrew’s room in the morning”; “Be careful not to interrupt your Uncle Timothy when he’s reading his paper,” and “There’s a go
od boy, fetch your grandfather’s shawl.” How I hated it all! And the crudest thing they did was to give me no excuse to hate them.

  I went to day school until I was fifteen when I was entered in the fourth form of Justin Martyr. I was sent there because it was a new school and cheaper than the others, and because the headmaster, Francis Prescott, had been a good friend of my Uncle Timothy Jones when they had worked together in New York Central. He often called at the house in those days, and, unlike other family visitors, always took notice of the lonely little boy hiding on a landing, behind a chair or under a table. Prescott would reach out suddenly in passing to grab and haul me forth, tousle my hair or pick me up and swing me about his head. Sometimes he would even bring me a present or take me into the backyard to play at catch. I was dazzled, a bit uncomfortably, to find myself so tossed about by this hearty young man. I suppose I appealed to his sympathy because the shame of my father’s disgrace attached itself to my woebegone appearance. When he departed for divinity school, acting on a decision that to me seemed as quick as it was quixotic, I felt sadly abandoned.

  Justin Martyr in 1891 was only five years old, with forty boys, six masters and one big yellow barn of a building that stood up barely in the midst of a large field near the village of New Paisley, thirty miles west of Boston. People were already beginning to say it had a great future, but to the hardworking headmaster who combined the functions of minister, teacher, coach, tutor and superintendent, that future must have still seemed a good way off.

  For me, anyway, coming from the gloom of the old Jones house on lower Madison Avenue, the first months there were a kind of paradise. The atmosphere seemed more that of a large happy family than of an academy. The masters, including Prescott, were all young and played football with the boys; everybody ate together at three round tables, and the Prescotts entertained the whole school at parlor games and singing on Saturday nights. Discipline was handled by simple reprimand or occasional extra chores, and sick boys were put up in the headmaster’s wing and looked after, when a trained nurse was not required, by Mrs. Prescott, who also taught the German classes. But above all there was a comradeship between the boys, even between those of different forms, which inevitably disappeared as the school increased in size. Dawn must give way to morning, but it was still bliss to have lived in that one.

  Prescott himself, who later became a somewhat austere figure to the multitudes of students who passed under his all-encompassing brown stare, was then on easy, even bantering terms with the older boys. He had a natural authority and could check the least familiarity with a glance, and he could be terrible in his tempers, but the occasions for them were rare. I was a modest boy and tended to keep myself out of his way in fear that he might think I was presuming on our old intimacy. I determined that I would win his respect independently of the family connection, and to do this I worked hard at my books, paid an almost fierce attention to his sermons in the little church in New Paisley where the school worshiped and flung myself recklessly at the biggest boys on the football field. As I was a rather small fifteen, I got badly battered a few times, and once the headmaster himself picked me up, patted me on the back and said with a laugh: “You’re a tough little fellow, Davey, but try to remember it’s only a game.” How I thrilled at those words!

  Human beings, however, cannot be happy together for long; the compulsion to mar a scene of content is, in my now long experience with my fellow men, sooner or later irresistible to the average observer. You may think you’re going your own way, inoffensively enough, modestly enough, not even whistling under your breath, but make no mistake. Someone is watching you and watching you with hate. How could it be otherwise? Animals live to kill and be killed, and if our food is supplied at table, the hunting instinct must still be satisfied. Every garden has a snake, and every boys’ school a Hal Leigh. Need I describe him? Surely the reader can see him, big and brash and sneering, popular with the boys who preferred the dirty story in the cellar to the clean play of the football field, feared by the weak, suspected by the strong, a brute, a bully and a toady. How I hate him still! It was he, one morning at recess time, when we were eating our crackers and discussing a test in mathematics, who brayed out: “Ask Griscam. His old man was a wizard at all that. He could multiply by a million, divide by himself and come out with zero.”

  I flew at him with a wild confidence that the wrath of the insane would make up for the difference in weight. It did not. My schooldays were not to be those of Tom Brown. I did not even manage to blacken one of Leigh’s eyes before he had knocked me over and kicked me down a stone stairway where I sprained both a wrist and ankle and cut an ugly gash in my head. While I was in the dispensary afterwards, having the cut treated by Mrs. Prescott, her husband came in and asked me how the fight had started. I imagined that he suspected the truth and would have gladly punished Leigh for his cruelty, but I refused to tell him a thing about it. No gentleman could have been more staunchly mute in concealing the indiscreet presence of a lady in his bachelor apartment than was I in shielding the hated Leigh. It was my code of honor, and I gloried in it because I thought it was the headmaster’s. I did not realize until years later that he was first of all an eminently practical man.

  The glory that I felt, however, was no match for my rancor against the unchastised Leigh. He made no further remarks about my father, it was true, but was his silence the equivalent of my limp or the pain in my wrist? I brooded over my injuries, both to my honor and to my person, until it seemed to me that I could not endure another week at school without some kind of retaliation. For all the power of Prescott’s personality and the weakness of Leigh’s, it was the latter which now discolored for me the light green of the woods and leered over a pale spring sky. I dared not assault Leigh again, for a second beating would have made me ridiculous and might have exposed me to the headmaster’s anger. I could not even complain to my friends about his viciousness without repeating his remark about my father. If I were to have my revenge, it would have to be underhanded, and how then was I ever to look Mr. Prescott in the face again?

  Unhappily for me, on a half holiday, the perfect opportunity presented itself. Several boys, including Leigh, had gone canoeing on the river, leaving their schoolbooks and papers in piles just inside the boathouse. I noted that Leigh had carelessly left on top of his pile the paper about the Punic Wars on which he had been working all term. It took only a minute to stuff his thesis in my pocket, all but the last page, and leave the door ajar so that the strong wind scattered the copybooks and notes over the dock and into the water. I then hurried off, unseen, to burn the Punic Wars, knowing that it would all seem an accident, as the discovery of that final page with the rest of the litter would confirm.

  And so in fact it turned out, but loud as were the howls of Hal Leigh at the loss of his masterpiece, instead of joy in my heart I felt only a sick depression. Even after the headmaster had agreed to give Leigh a mark for the lost paper higher than the original would have probably received, so that my act of vengeance had actually benefited my foe, I felt no relief. I had proved to myself that I had inherited my father’s character, and it could now be only a matter of time before I made this manifest to the world. I could visualize already the nodding heads and deep shrugs of my maternal uncles.

  As the spring deepened and the spirits of the boys rose, my own continued to decline until, morose and moody, my marks became affected. I caught a severe cold and in my state of dejection a fever followed, and for some days I was seriously ill in the Prescotts’ house with a day and a night nurse. But however much I may have romantically wanted to die, the melancholy spirit could not erode the vigor of my sixteen years, and I soon found myself on the road to a vulgar recovery. It may have been my need for a compensating drama that made me confess to the headmaster at my bedside the whole sorry tale of Hal Leigh.

  He was wonderful in that he accepted it with the same gravity in which it was offered. “Of course, you did a very wrong thing, Davey, and one that
I would not have expected of you. But on the other hand, I would not have expected you to have received such provocation.” He shook his head sadly. “And right here in Justin Martyr, too. Yet perhaps it is all for the good. You have to learn, my boy, to live with your father’s reputation. You need not be ashamed of it. Indeed, it would be very foolish of you to be ashamed of it. But you must accept it, because it is a fact.”

  “It’s hard to be the only boy with a father like mine.”

  “Very hard. I don’t minimize it.”

  “Your father was a hero.”

  “And that has its problems, too, Davey. The good Lord deals us our different hands to play, but don’t you suppose he keeps score according to how we play them? I find a hero in mine. Played one way he can set me. Played another he gives me rubber. Your father may seem a liability to you, but he can also be a challenge.”

  “To what?”

  “To a grand slam! Look, my boy: you have a name that is temporarily discredited. So be it. You have had a lonely childhood with uncles who are too afraid of being demonstrative to be properly kind. Oh, I know them.” He nodded slowly as I stared, fascinated by this new candor. “You have a mother who has been overburdened with disappointment.” I did not know then, but, of course, he did, that Grandpa Jones was at last dying and that Mother had refused to leave his bedside to come to mine. “But look now for your trumps. You have a first-class mind, a well-made body, an aptitude for friendship, high ideals and honesty. Are you to be put out of the game in the first rubber with all that?”

  “You really think I’m honest, sir? After what I’ve just told you about tearing up Leigh’s paper?”

  “Your telling me proves it. It was wrong, to be sure. But you had great provocation, and now you have made confession. It would be maudlin to dwell on it further.”