The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “And why I’m proud to be an artist!”

  “What you are, my dear girl, is not in question. It’s what Charley was. He used his pen to try to see God. When he had seen him, his papers were no more use than autumn leaves.”

  “Might they not help someone else?”

  Pa shook his head firmly. “They were too personal. Besides, they contained references to living people which would have been very painful.”

  “You mean references to me,” I cried, aflame now with indignation. “References to me that in print would have been painful to you. You couldn’t face the idea of letting the world see that I was Charley’s mistress!”

  “It would be nearer the point to say that I couldn’t face your pride in letting the world see it,” Pa retorted.

  “That’s a vile thing to say. Just because I wanted the one beautiful unique thing that Charley created in his short, unhappy life to survive as his memorial!”

  “Ah, uniqueness,” Pa muttered with a gesture of impatience. “There it is again. That’s all you care about. To stand out. To have people say: look, look, look. See me with my little pen or paint brush or chisel. I did it all myself!”

  “What else is there but death and annihilation?” I cried desperately. “Can’t you let us poor mortals live a bit first? Your trouble, Pa, is that you hate what happened to Charley in Paris. You had to tear up the record of his accomplishment and turn him back to an adolescent robot on the playing fields of Justin! You and his old bitch of a mother had to burn up everything but your own juvenile image of him.” I was now completely out of control. “I believe you killed Charley! Killed him with the dope of your nihilistic religion. And if he came to life, I believe you’d happily do it again!”

  Never shall I forget the look that Pa gave me then! Those great brown eyes glowered at me for what must have been half a minute, and then I saw a strange glint of yellow in their irises. I had the sudden terrible feeling that Pa was looking at me as a magistrate might have looked at a screaming, muddy street urchin caught in a bestial act and dragged before his bench.

  “You use the word ‘bitch’ very easily, Cordelia,” he said icily, as he turned away. “Take care you don’t give others cause to.”

  At this I had my first attack of real hysterics, and Mother had to sit up with me all night as I sobbed and screamed. By morning an equally violent reaction had set in, and my anger melted down with exhaustion to a murky cesspool of remorse. I insisted now that I was indeed a bitch and that a lifetime of penance and good works would hardly suffice to redeem me. I acknowledged, over and over again that I had sinned in distracting Charley from his one true path to consolation. And finally I announced solemnly that I would go home with my parents and assist them in their duties at Justin Martyr.

  Mother, who distrusted the durability of my mood, advised against it, but Pa, who for all his scorn of artists was inclined to see penitence in the light of a colorful drama of oils by Veronese or Tintoretto, insisted that I be taken at my word. When we sailed from Cherbourg I brought only three dresses from all my Paris stock. The rest I gave away, determined to select a new kind of wardrobe in Boston. I might have been taking the veil.

  Oh, that winter at Justin! Even my own powers of self-dramatization were barely enough to get me through it. I helped Mother with “parlor night,” Tuesdays and Fridays, when boys having the required grades were invited to our house from eight o’clock until nine to play games. Mother had a large and venerable collection of parlor games and puzzles, in all of which she used to participate with a passionate interest and competitiveness. I can still see her wonderful old witch’s profile over the parcheesi board and those glassy eyes intent upon a little boy counting out the steps for his disks. But I was bored by the games and played them badly and could never keep order at my table which was always in an uproar, to Pa’s extreme disapproval. In the mornings I earned a little money by tutoring boys in French, and in the afternoons I walked with Mother or trudged around the slushy campus by myself. As part of my penance I had given up painting; it was also the perfect way out of an artistic career for which I had little aptitude. I never went out to meals, and on the evenings when there was no parlor I would sullenly read Proust and Joyce by the fire and dream of the lives I had given up and of the lives I had never had. By early spring I was on the edge of a full nervous collapse.

  Mother, however, had been watching me. She knew well my habits of self-mortification and understood that to try to rescue me from my own stubbornness too early would only make matters worse. She also knew that when she did move, it would have to be decisively. One morning at breakfast she announced that I was to spend the spring vacation with my sister Harriet in New York.

  “Your father’s going to the ecclesiastical council at Hartford, and I’m going to stay with your Aunt Maud at Pride’s. The whole house is going to be painted, and I want everyone out. Harriest feels you’ve neglected her, so I took it upon myself to tell her you’d go.”

  I pretended to be angry and sulked for a day, but actually I appreciated Mother’s tact in getting me out of my own prison. I had had my fill of Justin and self-pity, for a while anyway. It is always a tricky business for a grown-up child to live with parents, particularly at her own request. She is in no position to throw bricks. Pa was little interested in advice as to how to run his school from anyone, let alone a daughter, and I had before me, night and day, the frustrating image of that educating machine that I could not even criticize. I do not mean to imply that Pa was not kind to me, for he was. We walked together at least one afternoon a week, and we breakfasted together every morning. But he took it painfully for granted that I had nothing better in which to interest myself than his school. He even expected me to know the names of the sixth formers and who were the prefects.

  Pa had the advantage over me in that he had been able to create a monster to which he could transfer an egotism that must in his youth have been even worse than mine, a monster of red brick and Romanesque arches, of varnished, carpetless halls and dreary stained glass windows, a monster that howled with the carnivorous howl of its four hundred and fifty cubs. I knew that if I did not get away, it would ultimately break me, as it had broken the plain, smiling, creeping, softly speaking wives of the masters.

  My sister, Harriet Kidder, “Goneril” as we called her in the family, had married to advantage in New York and lived in considerable state. She was ten years my senior, fifty pounds heavier and hundreds of times richer, but for all her disapproval of my bohemianism, she has too many of the basic Prescott doubts to enjoy a really comfortable sense of superiority. In fact, Harriet’s insecurity has often manifested itself in the crudest kind of boasting about the Kidder possessions, so that people meeting her for the first time are often surprised to discover that she was born a Boston Prescott.

  She and Evelyn and I seem to have in common a fatal incapacity ever to put anything quite behind us. In the library we tend to gaze out the window at the garden party which we have passed up and deplore an afternoon wasted on mere musty books, but the moment we have changed our minds and joined the garden party we turn from its trivia to stare back in at those abandoned tomes that now seem to contain the only true richness. We have the minds of scholars (oh, yes, we’re as bright as Pa, each one of us!) and the hearts of Pompadours. We would have done much better had we favored Mother.

  It was at Harriet’s that I met Guy Turnbull. Of course, it was not a coincidence. I was still married to Cabell Willetts, but Harriet insisted that getting a divorce was simply a matter of getting the right lawyer and that she would get him for me when the time came. Guy, a widower some fifteen years older than myself, was a great friend and business associate of my brother-in-law and constantly at the house. It was really very generous of Harriet to offer him to her erring sister. He was big and stout and loud and still blond, but he could have regained what must have been strikingly good looks by taking off sixty pounds—which he never did. He had that odd, almost ladylike fastidio
usness in taste and speech which so often goes with strong, self-made men and which whets the appetite of jaded creatures like myself who are titillated by a sense of the crudeness that must be so concealed.

  Guy wore silk shirts with jeweled cuff links and ordered his suits and boots from London; at restaurants he was always sending back dishes and examining the silverware for spots. Yet he thrilled me when he shouted at a taxi driver or snarled at an offensive drunk. He could be terrifying in his sudden animal loudness and his obvious hankering for a fight. And his laugh was frankly vulgar; he seemed in his hilarity to be recklessly trying to rip down all the illusions that one supposed him to have been at such pains to build up. Had Guy been less of a sentimentalist, had he not talked quite so much about his poor dear dead wife, I might have fallen seriously in love with him.

  As it was, there was only one place where Guy and I really belonged, and we soon got to it. Do you guess where that was? Really, Brian, don’t try so hard not to look shocked. Be natural. Of course you disapprove of my having gone to bed with Guy. He disapproved of it himself. There has always been something about me that has made my lovers want to keep me straight. With Charley it was the image of Pa, pursuing us to the most intimate recesses, but Guy had never met Pa, nor had his background been one to bring him under the shadow of the Prescott legend. Guy lumped Mother and Pa in a group that he loosely described as “society,” a term that he by no means used slightingly. On the contrary, he thought that “society,” like the Philharmonic and the opera, was something which ought to receive every self-made man’s support. And he was not at all sure that he was properly supporting it by making me his mistress.

  Harriet was furious. She accused me of a neurotic compulsion to become déclassée. She pointed out that it was just as easy to marry a man as to seduce him, and that, after all, I owed something to our parents. She explained at length her subtle maneuvers in convincing Guy that a wife of Prescott lineage was the one jewel missing in the crown of his material triumph. When I simply laughed at her, she sent me packing back to Justin and dispatched a long letter to Mother in which she suggested that Pa should summon up his heaviest battalions to combat my moral delinquency. I went back north, very pleased with myself. Guy and I had arranged to meet in Boston on the weekends to carry on what Harriet called our “intrigue.” Fortunately, it was convenient for him as he had to make periodic inspections of one of his textile mills in Lowell.

  Pa and Mother said nothing on my return, and I was divided between relief at being let alone and resentment at the idea that they had given me up. I consoled myself with the prospect of my weekends, and on early spring afternoons, circling the campus behind Mother and her two old beagles, I would look up defiantly at the great craggy oversized chapel tower, as ugly as Pa’s deity, and think that I, at least, enjoyed a real relation with a real man, that Guy and I gave each other the pleasure of our bodies without the cant of religious fantasy. And what was Justin Martyr to a man like Guy? Had he gone to such a school? Had he needed to? Could he have made any more money if he had? Might it not even have paralyzed some of his initiative? Schools like Justin, I decided, were endowed with the excess funds of patrons like Guy, and headmasters, like the big-hatted, black-robed tutors and pedants of seventeenth century comedy, had to perform grotesque antics in their benefactors’ audience chambers.

  But, indeed, I had not been given up. The coils of Justin had actually been tightening around me. One evening after supper in the school dining room Pa asked me to come to his study, and there, as I faced him across the huge square desk, like a boy about to be disciplined, he told me that he had finally persuaded Cabell Willetts to seek an ecclesiastical annulment of our marriage. I was so surprised that for a moment I could only stare.

  “It appears that he desires another union,” Pa added dryly.

  “With a nun?”

  “With a widow who shares his own deep faith.” Pa was not one to spoil his sarcasm with even a glint of the eye. His gravity was perfect. “Those of the Roman persuasion will not admit that a marriage has existed when there has been no matrimonial intent. If you will testify to a priest from the Rota that you never intended to be bound by your oath or to have children . . .”

  “But I did!”

  Pa surveyed me for a moment. Then without twitching a muscle in his face, without in the least compromising his solemn mien, he slowly lowered and retracted his left eyelid in a wink uncannily like that of a chicken. I was not amused.

  “A Catholic priest doesn’t count, is that it?” I demanded scornfully. “It’s all right to tell a lie to a Hottentot? Well, having no church, I can’t afford to dispense with my few principles so sweepingly. We agnostics, thank you very much, do have principles. If Cabell wants his annulment, let him tell his own lies. Even a Jesuit is entitled to the truth!”

  Pa nodded, but sighed. “It seems a pity. I have thought deeply in the matter, and I could not help wondering if it was a real marriage. You were so young and so determined to shock the old folks.”

  “I wasn’t as young as all that! And I had every intention of having a child. Thank God I failed!”

  “Amen,” Pa replied, with a sincerity that annoyed me. “Very well, my child, that is all there is to it. I thought it my duty to put the matter before you. But, of course, I shall never counsel you to go against your conscience.”

  When Mother heard about my stand, she was angrier than I had ever seen her. She could be terrible in her tempers, cold, articulate and biting. She seemed to lose all sense of her relationship with the person at whom she was angry, and she would strike at her own flesh and blood as if we were thieves in the night. The occasions were rare, but feared by all, even by Pa, or perhaps I should say particularly by Pa.

  “Even from you such gall astounds me!” she exclaimed. “To give your poor father a cheap sermon on intellectual honesty. After all he’s done for you. Do you think it was easy for him to go to the Willetts? Do you think it was pleasant for him to have to stick his arms into the mud of a Catholic annulment? Do you think he enjoyed having to root out all the facts of Cabell’s sanctimonious little love affair? I tell you it made him sick! But he did it because he thought that his daughter, who’s made such a stinking mess of her life, was entitled to another chance. And he did it, too, against his own conscience, after days of prayer and tortured reflections, to keep you from turning into the complete tramp that you show every sign of wanting to be. Well I tell you here and now, my girl, if you don’t go through with this annulment, you’ve seen the last of me. And I mean it!”

  As in Paris I had collapsed before Pa, so now did I collapse before Mother. None of us girls had anything like the force of personality of our parents. I could sneer at Pa and sulk with Mother, but I was no match for them in their real tempers. Without even talking to Pa I went to Boston and saw Cabell’s lawyer and prepared my testimony. The Willetts had great connections in the church, and in three months the annulment was procured. During the following summer I went to Reno and obtained my civil divorce. I then did a thing of which I am still ashamed. I wrote Cabell a letter in which I told him that my testimony was perjured and that the annulment was void in the eyes of God. He never answered, but I have often speculated about the effect of my message on his marital relations with the holy widow. Oh, yes, it was a bitchy thing to do, but you must remember that if he had given me my divorce when I had first wanted it, I could have married Charley and brought peace to the last months of his life.

  Everybody was pleased with the new, compliant Cordelia, even Guy, who after formally proposing to me at lunch in the Boston Ritz, announced that our other relationship would have to be suspended until marriage. Evidently the future Mrs. Turnbull—and he took it for granted, quite correctly, that despite my refusal to commit myself, I would ultimately become such—had to be beyond suspicion, even if it was a whitewash job. Guy was much more at his ease in the status of fiance to a Prescott than of lover. I suspected that he had another mistress, on a lower social l
evel, to take care of his physical needs, and that this explained his preference to have me chaste. Guy was enough of a bull to be fairly indiscriminate about his cows. I was a “lady,” and, to change the simile, he liked his pigeons to stay in their pigeonholes.

  Of course, he was enchanted with Pa. On the weekend when he was first invited to Justin, Pa took him over every nook and cranny of the school, and Guy thoroughly berated me afterwards for my past irreverence.

  “I realize, Cordie,” he told me, “that it must have been hard for a girl to be brought up in a boys’ school. But the fact remains that you’re prejudiced. Your father has created an extraordinary thing in Justin. He’d have made a tremendous businessman!”

  This was actually an idea that had often occurred to Pa himself. He had his moments, not so much when he regretted the fortune that he had not made as when he begrudged fortunes to those who had made them with less than his own capabilities. I remember a rich visitor to the school, who arrived in a long yellow Hispano-Suiza with glittering accessories, saying to Pa after lunch: “I’d give up all my corporations to have been the founder of Justin,” and Pa snapping back at him without a grin or a wink: “I’d give up Justin for your car.”

  But if nothing made Pa more scornful than wealthy men who sighed after the spiritual life, wealthy men who gloried in the bitter competition of the marketplace and in a creed that put the profit motive ahead of all intrigued him. Perhaps, he felt that like soldiers, they were nearer the basic male than himself. For all Pa’s faith and for all his accomplishments there was a side of him that tended to identify the priest’s cassock with a woman’s skirt and to sneer at the world of education as an ivory tower. He was in it himself, to be sure, but he had the vanity to want you to know that, unlike most of the inmates, he had not fled to it for refuge. He could have survived on the ringing plain. And he liked Guy for promptly recognizing this.