The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “He’s a natural, that fellow Turnbull,” he told me. “Hang on to him, Cordie. I sometimes wonder if we don’t send forth our graduates to a holocaust in which they must try their tinfoil swords against the steel of men like that. I wonder if he’d consider teaching a seminar course to the sixth form in business competition?”

  “He’d crave it!”

  And do you know, he did? He taught every Saturday morning during the fall term. Guy and Pa became the most devoted friends. They inspected Guy’s big mill at Lowell together as carefully as they had inspected the school, and Pa put me in mind of Boswell’s description of Dr. Johnson at the sale of the deceased Mr. Thrale’s brewery, bustling about amid the boilers and vats like an excise man, with an inkhorn and pen in his buttonhole, and talking pompously of the duties of his executorial office. Back at school he diverted the prefects’ table with an account of his excursion, including a graphic description of the chairman’s office.

  “I paused at the threshold, dazzled by the scene in front of me. As far as the eye could reach stretched grey sofas, mahogany tables, murals, shining appurtenances. I took a step forward; I lost my foothold; I cried out.” Here Pa stretched his arms wide. “Gentlemen, I solemnly assure you, I had sunk knee-deep in carpet!”

  Perhaps you can see what he was doing already, the old rascal. It was soon to become a pattern. He was undermining Guy with ridicule. Oh, yes, I realize that I sound inconsistent, and I repeat that he admired Guy. But he was also jealous of him. He envied Guy his business success, as he had envied Charley his war career. The only way that he had been able to reassure himself that he was as much of a man as Charley had been by asserting his religious leadership. He was smart enough to see that this would never work with Guy. For Guy he had to put into action his own superior intellect and erode with little sarcasms the uncomfortable image of the tycoon who could build a dozen Justins by signing detachable pieces of paper from a little black book that had nothing to do with hymns or prayers.

  I don’t want to sound too Freudian, but I was certainly in basic competition with Pa. My two men were men, after all, and they had looked to me for something that Pa could not offer. But Pa, the old magician, had ways of recovering distracted attention. He could prove to them that he, too, was a man, that he was more than a man; he could show them a heavenly kingdom where women and wars and moneymaking did not exist. And when Pa decided to be a prophet, he did so on a Cecil B. De Mille scale. He ended by making even Guy suspect that business was not all.

  My second marriage lasted seven years, but it was a failure from the start. Guy was carnal to a degree that even I had not believed possible. I learned to be glad every time he took a new mistress. He had some disgusting practices with which I need not shock you, and the foulness of his language in our bedroom was an education in vice. When he realized at last that there were certain things to which I was never going to submit, that I was not titillated but genuinely revolted, he began to hate me and to humiliate me whenever he could. Fortunately his large means and multiple business trips made it easy for us to live apart, and when we finally agreed upon a divorce he surprised everybody by the big alimony that he allowed me. I suppose he wanted even an ex-Mrs. Turnbull to live grandly and be a credit to him, for he provided that the payments would cease on my remarriage. However, I have fooled him, for I have arranged my life quite satisfactorily without marrying again. He should have remembered that I had learned the trick before.

  During the years of our marriage and despite its deterioration, Guy’s relations with Pa and Mother went from good to perfect. He frequently stayed with them at Justin without me. I would have thought that some of the crudity of the man would have repelled Mother, but she seemed immune to it. There was a worshiping little-boy quality about Guy as a son-in-law that was apparently irresistible. The line that he drew in his own mind between me and my parents was the line between the flesh and the spirit. All his reverence for the Prescotts as a symbol of what he called “distinguished living” went to Pa and Mother, while I became increasingly a mere physical convenience to him, and when I ceased to be convenient, I became nothing. Basically he must have always regarded me as a tramp with a lineage that was detachable and could be acquired by himself. Even after our divorce he continued to be on as good terms at Justin as ever.

  I resented it, of course. I resented Pa’s and Mother’s whole attitude about my marital troubles. It was only too obvious that they believed that any nice reasonable girl could have got along with Guy. When in desperation I told Pa a few of the true facts, he listened with an interest that I was sure did not stem entirely from sympathy with his daughter. Part of it was the natural lubricity that exists in even the holiest mortals and part was perhaps his feeling that such activity as I described was characteristic, however unfortunately, of any real male. Or perhaps he simply thought that I was making it up, and his attention was a mask for the horror that he felt at having sired so morbid and malevolent a daughter. In all events he never referred to it, but continued to see Guy as before.

  I fumed at such disloyalty, but I fumed in vain. Pa stimulated Guy’s interest in the school to the point where he did something that was in direct contradiction to every principle in his self-aggrandizing nature. He made an anonymous gift. Yes, I see how big your eyes are, Brian. You can’t believe that the man I have described would forego the glory of a public presentation. But do you know why? Because his money was allocated to the erection of that grey sweeping temple dedicated to the god of sport and named for the dead hero whose beautiful statue by Malvina Hoffman, so radiantly evocative of golden youth cut short, stands before its portals. Charley Strong and Guy Turnbull had more in common at last than the physical possession of Cordelia Prescott.

  14

  Brian’s Journal

  APRIL 3, 1942. It seems like a miracle (and how do I know it’s not?) that I can open this journal and record that I am living in Cambridge, enrolled at last in divinity school!

  I can hardly take in that only four months have elapsed since my last entry. It has been, anyway, a period long enough to go to hell and back, and I say this fully and humbly recognizing that during every minute of it I have been safe and sound while American boys were dying in the Pacific. But I have learned that safety and soundness can have their own hellish twist.

  It started with Pearl Harbor, which was greeted by the Griscams with the hysteria that children might show to a premature Santa Claus. War seemed the extra dimension that had been needed in their lives. To Mrs. Griscam it was the ultimate opportunity for her “army,” through military recreation centers, to reach American youth; to Amy it was escape into glamour through the Red Cross; to Sylvester it was the dignity, after domestic scandal, of a naval officer’s uniform and a desk in Church Street where his father could not check up on him, as opposed to one in Wall, where he could. And to Mr. Griscam, happiest of all, it meant secret trips to the State Department, even the White House and the rumor of a diplomatic post to the governments in exile. In the bustle of those days it seemed to my saddened eyes that nobody over five and thirty could possibly want peace.

  Not that I was left out in the division of spoils. Mr. Griscam spoke of taking me abroad as his private secretary. “Freedom First” had been officially closed, and I was helping to liquidate the office. But I felt a violent and unreasonable aversion to clambering on the Griscam band wagon. I wanted my war to be a grimmer, obscurer business. As I could not continue to accept Mr. Griscam’s bread and shelter under the circumstances, I quietly decamped during one of his absences in Washington, leaving four polite and grateful letters to my hosts, and moved to a boardinghouse on West 90th Street. I then took a volunteer job, suggested by one of my fellow workers at “Freedom First,” from midnight to eight in the dispatcher’s office of the Fire Department at Central Park. I figured that I could just subsist on my own small income and make this token contribution to the defense of the city.

  I moved through the cold, dreary winter like a man
who has been drugged. I performed my almost mechanical tasks at the dispatcher’s office with adequate efficiency; I enrolled as an air raid warden, and I contributed my services as a dishwasher to a stage door canteen. There still remained a goodly number of hours in each week when I would sit on the bed in my little room and read Trollope. Only after I had done everything for the war that I could think of doing did I permit this escape to the world of Plantaganet Palliser and Lady Glencora.

  I would have seen nobody at all had it not been for Mrs. Turnbull. She tracked me down through the Griscams and insisted that I dine with her on my night off from the Fire Department. When I went there, unable to think of an excuse, I found a large party of artists and dealers who did much drinking and talking. Nobody but my hostess, who insisted that I call her “Cordelia,” paid the least attention to me, but I found it diverting for a change to hear talk that was not about the war, and I went again on several occasions.

  I suppose I should have suspected that Cordelia had her own plans for me. After all, it was obvious that I was not being asked because I could paint or talk, and she was very put out once when I refused to linger after the others had risen to go. But she must have been fifteen years my senior, and I have suffered all my life from a feeling that I am unattractive to women, a feeling which has survived (I may say at least to my journal without fatuity) a certain amount of evidence to the contrary.

  My naïveté in this case let me in for an appalling scene. One night I went to the duplex to find myself the only guest. Cordelia, reclining in a pink negligee before a pitcher of martinis in which she had obviously been imbibing prior to my arrival, might have scared me to instant flight had not her voice been so gruff and matter-of-fact.

  “Yes, sweetie, we’re all alone,” she said as she took in my apprehensive glance at the table set cozily for two by the window. “After dinner I’ll play soft music and show you my etchings. Don’t look so scared. It won’t hurt. Here, give yourself a drink.” But when she abruptly changed the subject, I decided in a flutter of relief that she must be joking. “This damn war,” she continued. “I’m sick of it already. The last one was bad enough, but at least there was all that Wilsonian idealism. Oh, I grant you, it nauseated me at the time, but now I find it’s worse without it. All you young people are so terrified that anyone will think you think you’re making the world safe for democracy that of course you won’t. Not a chance of it.”

  She continued morosely in this vein all during a lengthy cocktail period and a much shorter dinner. I wondered hopefully if the amount of gin that she was consuming might not end by disposing of my problem, but her capacity seemed unlimited. Only her temper was affected, for it grew shorter and shorter. After the meal she blew up at me for suggesting that we listen to The Magic Flute.

  “Everyone likes Mozart now,” she grumbled. “Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, that’s all you youngsters want. Give me Beethoven. He’s obvious, but God knows, so am I. At least, he was a man.”

  We listened to the Seventh, I constrainedly, she moodily. I noted that she had shifted to bourbon.

  “I said I was obvious, honey,” she repeated in a more ominous tone. “What did you think I meant by that?”

  “Simply that you liked loud, emphatic music.”

  “And not loud, emphatic men?”

  “Perhaps them, too.” I managed a shrug. “What a pity they’re all away.”

  “Isn’t it just?” she took me up sarcastically. “Isn’t it hard on poor Cordelia? But it luckily happens that she also has a taste for quiet little boys of milder emphasis. Like you, bunny. Yes, dear, I fancy you. Can you bear it?”

  “I’m glad you like me.”

  “Oh, come off it, bunny!” she exclaimed sharply. “I didn’t say I liked you. I’m not at all sure I do. I said I fancied you. Don’t pretend you don’t know what that means. Don’t you think you could fancy me for a bit?” Her tone was of mock cajolery. “Just for a wee bit, bunny?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Turnbull . . .” I began in an agony of embarrassment.

  “Cordelia!”

  “I’m sorry, Cordelia, but I don’t think I could ever . . . well, I don’t think I could ever feel that way about you. I respect you very much, but I’m not . . .” I braced myself. “Well, I’m not in love with you.”

  Her shriek of laughter was shocking. “I should hope not! I’m not in love with you. But you have a scared littly bunny look that I find intriguing. Don’t you think it might be fun to pretend we were in love just for tonight?” She looked at me with bold, penetrating, still laughing eyes. “Are you a virgin, bunny? I’ll bet you are.”

  “Please, Cordelia!”

  “Well, why be ashamed of it? All would-be ministers should be virgins till they marry, shouldn’t they? I like the idea of your being a virgin!”

  I rose, trembling with embarrassment and indignation. “I think I’d better go now.”

  She reached out and caught my arm and pulled me down on the sofa beside her. “Is it Pa you’re worried about? Forget him. He understands a lot more things than you think. Come on, bunny, relax. It’s a great big lonely war, and Cordelia’s all warm and nice and huggy.”

  “No!” I tore myself away and jumped up.

  “Oh, but yes, bunny.” She rose and threw her strong left arm about my neck and implanted a sticky, whiskeyed kiss on my shrinking lips while with her free hand . . . !

  I cannot write what she did with her free hand.

  Again I ripped myself from her embrace and made a frantic dash for the hall. In the foyer I kept my finger on the elevator bell as if I were escaping a fiend. As the doors swung open and I plunged into the car I could hear through the open front door behind me, her mocking farewell: “Good night, Joseph Andrews!”

  All that night in my rented room that cry sounded in my ears. Joseph Andrews! Did that shameless hussy know that poor Joseph Andrews who saves his virtue from the brazen Lady Booby, naked under her sheet, was a caricature of my adored Mr. Richardson’s Pamela? Was it not enough that Cordelia had confused the image of her sainted father in my mind with that of a leering vamp? Did she have as well to make the father of the English novel, whose little portrait by my bed had been a consolation in war and peace, ridiculous? It seemed to me as I lay tossing that Cordelia had fouled not only her nest but the universe, that the very war was hardly worth winning if she was what our boys would come home to.

  Things went from bad to worse. I could not recapture in the days that followed even the flitting sense of utility that my frenzied war activities had briefly given me. It seemed to me now that I was only a fool and, like all fools, thinking only of myself. Had I not allowed an unchristian prejudice against Mr. Griscam to keep me from assisting him in what was perhaps an important diplomatic post? Wasn’t my whole attitude about the war simply a demonstration of my need to appease the ego? I found I could not even read Trollope and took to going to the movies in the afternoon.

  One night, going to work, I had a distressing experience in the subway. It was raining, and the car was very crowded and stuffy. When the doors opened at Seventy-second Street a group of rather rowdy Negro boys, in red and yellow jackets, shoved their way in, jostling and pushing the other passengers, laughing loudly and using rough language. This in itself was nothing, and the passengers hardly noticed the intrusion. The boys, after all, if rude were not bad-tempered. They were even in a rather pleasant mood. But what distressed me was that in the heat and closeness, listening to the high laughs and the crude remarks, I momentarily lost my faith.

  I thought: how could God want all the creatures in that car, including myself (oh, yes, including myself) to enter into eternal life? It was not that those cackling boys were wicked, but whatever they were, good or bad, the point struck at me that a mortal lifetime seemed quite as long as one could want for them. A long happy lifetime—to be sure, one wished them that—but immortality? Were they up to it? I thought of Calvin and his answer to my problem in the doctrine of elected souls, but wasn’t it wors
e to have some saved than none? That was the horror of Calvin, like the horror of the Inquisition and the horror of Hitler, and where these horrors did not exist, I faced the horror of the empty grins and silly laughs in the underground of Manhattan.

  I suppose it was inevitable that in this mood and with my odd hours of work I should have sickened and that a feverish cold should have turned into pneumonia. My landlady behaved with the greatest consideration, and the doctor whom she called pulled me through, but for a day I was delirious. It seemed to my darkened mind that the only thing to dread was recovery.

  And then, just as I passed the crisis, he came. I heard the rich, deep voice from far away:

  “I am going to take care of you, Brian. As soon as you’re feeling better I shall move you to my daughter Harriet’s apartment. She and her husband have gone to Washington. It will be a good place for your recuperation.”

  “But how . . . how . . . ?”

  “How did I know? You put my name down as the person to notify in emergency on the form that you filled out at the Fire Department. It touched me very much, dear boy.”

  Had I? It all seemed a dream but a wonderful one. If I had died, I had gone to heaven, and wasn’t that just the place I would expect to meet Dr. Prescott?

  But I had not died. Sitting in Mrs. Kidder’s beautiful Georgian living room overlooking the East River, we spent our mornings with books and games and puzzles, and often just gazing down at the tugs and naval vessels and the big squawking gulls that flew low over the thick grey eddying fullness of that rapid water. I would not have believed it possible to be so relaxed with him. When I started once to make a murmuring effort to articulate my gratitude, he pulled me firmly up:

  “Let us settle the question of thanks once and for all, Brian, and then it needn’t bother us again. I am an old man, and I have nothing else to do. I like you, and I want to help you. You may show your gratitude, if you must, by allowing me to finish up the job I’ve started.”