The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Mr. Mygatt might have put it there himself,” he suggested blandly when I asked for his comments.

  “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “To curry favor with the Rector. He’s like that, you know.”

  “I can’t believe it, Totten!”

  He shrugged. “It was only an idea. I’d do anything to see poor Shelley cleared. He’s the oldest friend I have in the world.”

  I had to pause here to reflect. The only thing I had not considered was that Totten might not have heard of Tanager’s accusation. “That’s not what Tanager seems to think.”

  His eyebrows rose. “It’s not, sir? What does Shelley think?”

  “He told Dr. Prescott that you had put that trot in his desk.”

  Totten looked at me steadily for a moment, but his expression struck me not so much as alarmed or shocked or even as very much surprised, but simply as interested, intensely interested.

  “It must have been you or he,” I pursued.

  “Or Mr. Mygatt,” Totten retorted with a smile that struck me suddenly as impudent. With a familiarity in marked contrast to his former deference, he rose from his chair and went to the window where he stood looking out, casually twirling the shade cord. He must have remained there in total silence for almost three minutes while I stared at his back. I assumed that he was concocting an alibi, and I was too interested in what it might be to interrupt him. “Or dear little mincing Mygatt,” he said at last, repeating his obviously insincere accusation.

  “Please remember, Totten, that Mr. Mygatt is a member of the faculty of this school and that I am a trustee.”

  “Oh, keep your shirt on, Griscam,” he retorted with a cool, shocking insolence, turning back to me with a now brazen smile. “You and I don’t have to kid ourselves, do we? You’re scared shitless this little affair will do you out of old Tanager’s dough, aren’t you?”

  “Totten! I shall have to report you to the headmaster.”

  “What the hell, lay off it, will you!” His barking tone startled me with its authority. “I knew when they put a shyster like you on my trail, the game was up. All right, so I put the goddam trot in little Shelley’s desk. Is that enough for you? Can I go now? Or shall I give old Prescott other grounds to throw me out by kicking you first in the tail?”

  As I stared, my dignity shattered, at that grinning, insinuating, oddly unhostile countenance, I found that for all my years at the bar, I had no idea what to do next. It was he who solved it. He walked slowly up to me, still smiling, and suddenly stuck out his hand. Hypnotized, I took it, at which he laughed aloud, winked and left the room. Certainly he had a kind of disgusting animal charm. There was an uncomfortable democracy in his total cynicism. I sighed, shuddered, shook my head and prepared to make my report to the headmaster.

  Prescott took my news like a gentleman. He put his arm about my shoulders and gave me a hug. “You’ve saved me from an act of brutal injustice, David. I must learn a proper humility with regard to your profession. I confess to the ancient and unworthy prejudice against lawyers. I have always accused them of not seeing the forest for the trees. Yet I was the one who couldn’t see those trees.” He shook his head ruefully. “I would have torn up young Tanager, a tender sapling, roots and all. Yes, there was prejudice. Because the poor boy was unattractive and unathletic, I would have had him vicious, too. While the one who was clever enough to cast himself in the image that I set up was the real rotter. Oh, it’s a lesson for me, David!”

  Harriet Prescott, however, professed to find the whole thing incredible. “I’m not going to say it to anyone else,” she told me as I circled the campus with her and her dogs before lunch. “Obviously, if Max Totten has confessed, I’m bound by it. But I will say to you, David, that it baffles me. I’ve watched that boy carefully. He always came to my parlor nights. I feel that I know him and that I like what I know. The boys may not, but I do. He’s more mature than the others. He’s had a bitter and humiliating childhood, and he’s going to make up for it in life. Oh, yes, he’s devious and sly and intriguing. He’d use a thousand trots and swear on the Bible he hadn’t. But I can’t believe that he’d have placed that trot in Shelley Tanager’s desk. His one virtue is loyalty!”

  I was greatly troubled, for I knew Harriet to be a shrewd judge of character, considerably shrewder, even, than her husband. Also, it occurred to me that it was odd that Totten, even if guilty, should have confessed to an action that would forever embroil him with his patron, Mr. Tanager. Why would he not have brazened it out? Might he not have convinced the father that the son was lying, or at least mistaken? And, after all, he had nothing to lose by trying, for this way he was both expelled from Justin and damned with the Tanagers. After our walk I went to the chapel, so soon, as I hoped, to be replaced by a new and greater one, and prayed earnestly for guidance, but I received none. I have never thought that the good Lord, like his servant, Frank Prescott, took a proper interest in lawyers.

  That afternoon I made my way to Max Totten’s dormitory in Lowell House. At the end of the long empty corridor between the varnished cubicles, each sheltered by a green curtain, I saw a trunk and standing before it, putting shirts in a drawer, was Max. His back was to me, and I could hear him humming “After the Ball.” To my astonishment I saw that he was smoking a cigarette which he made no effort to conceal as he turned and saw me.

  “Hello, Mr. Griscam,” he called with the same cheerful impudence. “Is this the official farewell?”

  I walked down the corridor and stood watching him as he continued his packing. “I came to tell you that you could drop the bluff. I know you didn’t do it.”

  Totten looked up at me cagily but with his same smile. “Know? How do you know?”

  “You wouldn’t have had time to wipe your fingerprints off the trot.”

  His smile became fixed as he continued to stare at me. “What makes you think they weren’t on it?”

  “Because I sent it into Boston this morning, with prints of Tanager’s and Mygatt’s fingers. They were the only ones found on the cover. The detective just called me.”

  “And have you told the Rector?”

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t told anybody. I thought I’d better come straight to you first. Why did you confess to something you hadn’t done?”

  I was a bit ashamed, watching those darkening eyes, of my own pleasure at outbluffing a mere boy, but the scene that morning still rankled. My pleasure, however, was not to be of any duration. Totten was a master at table turning.

  “Look, Mr. Griscam, you strike me as a realistic guy. Can’t you and I make a deal? We each have a hell of a lot at stake in this business. You want old Tanager’s money for a greater Justin, isn’t that it? In fact, your whole wagon cart may fall in if you don’t get it, and you sure as hell won’t get it if little Shelley is bounced. I, on the other hand, have my own deal with old Tanager. He knows all about Shelley and what poor stuff the kid is. He’ll know who had that trot, never fear. But he’s crazy to have the boy graduate, and it’s my job to see that he does. If you will be kind enough to let me go through with my little plan, I’ll see that you get through with yours.”

  I gaped at the boy, more stupefied than I had been that morning. “But you’ll have given yourself a bad character!” I protested.

  “For using a trot? Come off it. That’s in the category of boyish pranks. And I’ll have Mr. Tanager where I want him for life. Oh, I have great plans there. Great plans. Shelley’s never going to be any use to his old man in the business. But I am. And his old man, deep down, prefers me to Shelley. He and I are the same type.”

  “Do you honestly expect me to make such a deal with you?”

  “Why not? Isn’t it for the glory of God? He gets his chapel, and you get your big school, and I get my benefactor. And otherwise we all get nothing.”

  I hesitated, which of course was fatal. “But you’re too young to be allowed to take that responsibility on your own shoulders.”

  “Do
you really believe that?”

  I looked into those small glinting eyes, so full of premature worldly wisdom, and decided sadly that I did not. I imagined that the understanding between this boy and his patron was complete, and I felt a sudden certainty that the future would work out exactly as he saw it. I even wondered if he might not be a closer relation to Mr. Tanager than cousin. He had all the jauntiness, guile and charm of a papal bastard in the Renaissance.

  “You won’t mind leaving school?”

  “This dump? Are you kidding?”

  “Of course,” I murmured sadly as I turned away, “it’s just what I am doing. Kidding myself as well as others. God forgive me, Totten, but I’ll go along with you.”

  “It’s a deal then?” For a second time that day he held out his hand, and for a second time I took it.

  “It’s a deal.” I walked back down the dormitory corridor and turned back at the end. “By the way,” I called to him, “that business about the fingerprints was a bluff. The trot has never left the school grounds.”

  His roar of laughter filled the big empty chamber. “What a tricky old shyster you are, Griscam! When my ship comes in, I’ll hire you for my lawyer.”

  I may as well put in here that as president of the Tanager Yards he remains to this day one of my most valued clients. But then, sick at heart with my own duplicity, I went to Prescott and pleaded with him to commute Totten’s sentence to a month’s suspension.

  “How can I, my dear David?” he protested. “If it were simply the business of the trot, I might reconsider. But how do we get around the business of his trying to throw the blame on Shelley Tanager? That destroys all my sympathy. Doesn’t it yours?”

  What could I say? I had sealed my bargain with Max Totten in a handshake, and for all his scant sixteen years I knew that I had been dealing with my peer. I suddenly felt very tired, and I decided that I would return to New York that night. There was no telling of what indiscretion I might be guilty if I remained another day at Justin.

  Mr. Tanager’s pledge came in the following month for exactly double the amount I had requested, and the great job of fund raising was at last completed. In the next two years the new dormitories, the chapel, the gymnasium, the handball courts, the wings to the Schoolhouse, the infirmary and six new masters’ houses were erected, and by 1910 Justin Martyr had assumed very much the external appearance that it wears today. The enrollment and the faculty were doubled, and Francis Prescott took a long stride towards the deanship of New England headmasters.

  The new, larger school was more democratic than the old. Justin Martyr has never had the aura of snobbishness under which Groton and St. Mark’s have suffered. Well endowed with scholarships, it has many boys of humble background as well as sons of the old and new rich. My own work in interesting some of the greatest of our new industrialists in the school has swollen its treasury beyond that of any other comparable private school. Justin’s reputation is an aggressive one, both in sports and studies. It is known not to suffer fools gladly. Perhaps it has been a bit severe, but one can’t have everything. The school was named for the early martyr and scholar who tried to reconcile the thinking of the Greek philosophers with the doctrines of Christ. Not for Prescott were the humble fishermen who had their faith and faith alone.

  Shelley Tanager graduated the year after Max Totten’s expulsion, but only by the blond hair of his head. He then proceeded to drink his way through Harvard to an early grave. But in his more drunken bouts before the end he was inclined to tell strange stories, and there was one in particular that came to my tensely listening ears about a self-sacrificing friend. It had two versions. In the first the friend was a sort of Sydney Carton who repaid his debt to his roommate’s father by assuming his roommate’s misdeed. In the other he was a sinister creature who used a seeming sacrifice to replace his roommate in the affections of a millionaire parent. I confess that my first reaction to the news of Tanager’s death was one of relief that the source of these rumors was now dry.

  I never got up the courage to ask Prescott if he had heard them, but I did once ask Harriet, on one of our walks after a trustees’ meeting.

  “Of course he heard them,” she replied. “Frank hears everything. People say he’s so formidable, but it doesn’t seem to keep them from blabbing their secrets to him. It’s unbelievable what they tell that man! Perhaps they want to shock him.”

  “But did he believe it? I mean, that Max Totten let himself be expelled to protect Tanager?”

  She gave me the briefest glance. Oh, the briefest! Harriet knew how to do that. “Do you?”

  “Not in the least!”

  She nodded, apparently accepting it. “Well, I don’t know what Frank thought. I suspect that he didn’t really face it. In fact, I wonder if he didn’t turn his back on it.”

  “That doesn’t sound like him.”

  “It doesn’t, does it? But, you know, David, every man has his moments of evasion. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t. And you know how he cares about that.” She turned and pointed with her umbrella to the great dark craggy tower of the new chapel that dominated the campus and even the countryside, the tower which had become already, on platters and seals and postcards, the very symbol of the school and of Frank Prescott’s bold thrust into the infinity of ignorance. “How do you think,” she demanded, facing me with her challenging stare, “he could live with it if he thought it had been built on a lie?”

  11

  Brian’s Journal

  NOVEMBER 15, 1941. On opening this neglected journal I find that there have been no entries since April. My only excuse is that when Dr. Prescott retired in June, the bottom fell out of my life. Before he left for the Cape to visit his daughter, Mrs. Homans, he arranged for my scholarship at Harvard Divinity in the fall and offered me the hospitality of Justin in July and August to do my preparatory reading. Nothing could have been more kindly meant, and nobody could have been more unworthy of his kindness. During the long hot summer in the deserted school, with too many books and too few people, my nerves went back on me.

  Everything on the campus from the graceful elms to the great beetling chapel tower reminded me of Dr. Prescott and seemed to point up the contrast between us. Did I dare aspire to ordination in a church where such men as he were priests? As the turgid days wore on, his absence and his retirement combined to create in my fantasies the hallucination of his demise, and the heavy red and grey of the school’s architecture seemed to enclose me in a granite mausoleum. Within the campus and all around me was the death of dignified and mighty things and without, borne in by black headlines, was the death of barbarians in the ghastly Russian struggle. I did not lose my faith—not quite—but I lost everything else. By September I was in no possible state to enter divinity school.

  It was in this condition that Mr. Griscam found me when he stopped at the school on his way down from Northeast Harbor. He took me out for dinner at the New Paisley Inn, forced me to drink two strong cocktails and elicited the dreary story of my summer. He guessed at once that what most appalled me was the prospect of telling Dr. Prescott the small advantage I had taken of his goodwill.

  “My dear fellow, leave that to me,” he said blandly. “Frank will understand. He’s the last person to push anyone into the ministry. Why, he had to go into the railroad business before he could make up his own mind. The only thing to do with a doubt, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, is to give in to it. But afterwards one mustn’t just mope. What are you going to do?”

  I told him that my heart classified me as 4F, but that I hoped to get a Red Cross job that would send me overseas.

  “So like a young man,” he said with his tolerant smile, “to think first of his conscience and last of his utility. You’d all rather clean latrines than be Secretary of War, so long as you can get into something that looks like a uniform. But you should be above that, Brian. You should come and work in my ‘Freedom First’ Committee.”

  He explained that this had been organized to combat
the “America First” movement and spread propaganda for immediate intervention in the war. If I believed, he argued, what I professed to believe: that every man and woman in the free world should join the fight against Hitler, then I ought to help to persuade them. When I protested in dismay that I would be urging other young men to shoulder arms in a struggle where I could take no active part, he pointed out that the moral comfort which I would thus be giving up might be precisely the sacrifice which the war demanded of me. When I insisted that I could never accept a salary for such work and could hardly live in New York without one, he offered me room and board in his own house and a chance to earn pocket money by cataloguing his Elizabethan collection.

  I was no match, certainly in my nervous state, for the arguments of so persuasive a lawyer and diplomat. The very next day he bore me off, with my few chattels and the little portrait of Richardson, in the back seat of his big black Cadillac, and before I quite realized what had happened, I found myself in a long row of desks in a big office overlooking Fifth Avenue whose walls were covered with the banners of occupied nations, writing releases on what it was like to live under the Nazi boot. It has all been a bit of a nightmare, but I keep reminding myself of Mr. Griscam’s injunction that I am sacrificing the only thing I could sacrifice: my own isolation and ease of conscience. It has been a consolation to think that in all likelihood we will soon be in the war, and then the offices of “Freedom Now” can be shut for good.

  Life with the Griscams in Sixty-eighth Street is as comfortable, I’m sure, as money, servants and good management can make it, and it is only my self-consciousness that makes me suffer. I cannot convince myself that the maid who does my room in the morning does not regard my presence as an imposition and that the grave old butler in the dining hall below does not resent having to set an extra place at table. Yet their demeanor, I hasten to record, is perfect. Everything, in fact about this big yellow sandstone house is perfect. Perhaps that is just my trouble.