The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  In a week’s time we were taking little walks in Carl Schurz Park to take advantage of the brief new sunshine. I was feeling now the beginnings of a restoration not only of my body but of my mind. I still had the sense that I had had since Pearl Harbor of suspended animation—of existing in an echoing void—but the sense had ceased to be disagreeable. The echoes were softer, almost at times consolatory. As soon as Dr. Prescott felt that I was strong enough, he began to talk to me about the ministry.

  “I see now that I made a mistake when David Griscam told me about your decision not to go to Harvard. I should have left the Cape and gone to you at once. But I hesitated to use any pressure. I thought that if your call was not clear enough, that might be a warning that the church was not your true vocation. What I failed to see was that you are the exception to an otherwise valid rule. I am now confident, my boy, that your call is a true one and that the impediments in your way have been simple nervous afflictions that will disappear once you have learned to face them. That is why I want you to go to divinity school as soon as you are well. I do not even want you to wait until next fall. The sooner you are actually taking courses the better.”

  “But won’t I have to wait for the beginning of the school year?” I protested, drawing back instinctively from the prospect of decision.

  “For credit, yes. But I have arranged with the Dean that you may be admitted now as an auditor.”

  “I’m afraid, sir, I’m not ready!”

  “You never will be if you wait. With you and me faith will always be a matter of exercise. But the faith that you work for is just as fine as the faith that is conferred. Perhaps finer!”

  I told him now of my dismal experience with the Negro boys in the subway and asked him if one of such visceral reactions had any right to become a minister.

  “We all have such reactions,” he replied. “I am besieged with them myself. Moments of vacuum, I call them. I’m sorry to say they do not disappear with age. Nobody can believe in a life hereafter all the time. What you must do is accept your moods of doubt, as you have just accepted your illness. You must say to yourself: ‘Here I am, a believer who is doubting.’ Then you will find that, although alone with yourself in that terrible vacuum, you still can see yourself. See yourself doubting. Instead of self-revilement, there may be calm. Instead of blame, there may be sadness. And if you will wait quietly enough and long enough, that vacuum may suddenly and thrillingly begin to throb again with your awareness of the presence of God.”

  “But isn’t it a terrible thing to think so little of one’s fellow humans? I had no right to be put off by those colored boys.”

  “No right, of course. But you were. You have to accept the fact that there is that in you. But why does it matter?” Here he stopped and turned on me and smote his fist into the palm of his other hand. “You know God exists, and you know those boys have immortal souls! That you didn’t believe it for a time is simply a fact. A little fact that, like so many others, is of little importance.”

  “I pray that may be so, sir.”

  “It is so, Brian, believe me.” He pricked his brows and became sunk in reverie. “We can overcome a great many things by the simple expedient of accepting them. I used to worry that I did not sufficiently love my daughters. You see, dear boy, I am taking you into my deepest confidence. But now I see that loving them inadequately was part of me and part of the condition into which they were born. God did not expect me to love them more. I couldn’t. He expected me to tend them devotedly. Ah, love.” He grunted suddenly. “Those who merely love get too much credit from a world of geese. It isn’t love children need. It is devotion.”

  As I came gradually to accept his theory that I should stop fretting about faith, a wonderful peace began to creep over me. One by one he disposed of my remaining objections.

  “You’ve tried to fight, and they wouldn’t have you,” he retorted to my protest that I should do war work. “That’s all that can be expected of a man. Now your place is back in the church. Do you think God’s work must stop in wartime? Do you think ministers won’t be needed when peace comes?”

  I asked him if it was fair to take up a place in divinity school, particularly on a scholarship, when I still had doubts if I would ever be ordained.

  “But ordained or not ordained you are always going to be a minister,” he insisted. “Personally, I think you will come back to Justin and teach. There is no real distinction between the pulpit and the classroom. I tried to put God into every book and sport in Justin. That was my ideal, to spread a sense of his presence so that it would not be confined to prayers and sacred studies and to spread it in such a way as to make the school joyful.” He shook his head ruefully. “Oh, if I could have done that, Brian, Justin would have been a perfect thing. It would have been the model for all preparatory schools!”

  “It is, sir.”

  “It is not, my boy, but I’m counting on you to help make it so.”

  There was no resisting this. Besides, I no longer wanted to. I had a new conviction now that I would be able to stick it at Cambridge. I even wondered if I might not like it. And I have. Of course, I know that he is only thirty miles away at the Andrews cottage at Justin, and that thought helps to sustain me. But I do not run to his side every time I feel giddy. It has been agreed between us that I must learn to stand on my own feet.

  Before we left New York he discovered something that I had not dreamed he would ever discover. On our last day he suggested that I come and lunch at Cordelia’s, and I declined, saying that I did not wish to intrude on a family party. When he insisted, and I continued to refuse, flushing deeply, he grunted.

  “She told me you wouldn’t come. What’s it all about? Has something happened between you and Cordie?”

  “Oh, no!” I cried in dismay. “Nothing, I assure you!”

  “Nothing, eh?” He gave me a shrewd stare. “Well, I daresay it wasn’t her fault. But I see she must have given you a scare. You’ve got to learn not to worry about women like Cordie. They’re basically simple creatures. She says she told you about her marriages.” His smile was faintly grim. “Poor Cordie. Harriet used to say it was all our fault. That we didn’t cuddle her enough when she was little. I’m afraid she’s made up for that since. Did she tell you about Charley Strong?”

  “A bit.”

  “I loved Charley, and it was my sad duty to have to rescue him from Cordie. Of course, she could never forgive that.”

  “She says you destroyed his book.”

  “Yes, I told her so. At the time she was very distraught, and I thought the truth would upset her more. Actually, Charley destroyed it himself for fear she would publish it. All but one chapter which he gave to me. I still have it.” He stared for a minute down at the river, and when he looked up at me there was a gleam of amusement in his eyes. It was a sarcastic, an almost impish gleam. “I’ll send it to you, if you like. When you’re safely ensconced in Harvard. It mightn’t be a bad thing for you to read. You’ll see the terrible consequences of sex. Or, perhaps I should say, the consequences of brooding about sex.”

  He took no chances with me as he did last summer, but accompanied me, when the doctor pronounced me recovered, to Boston, where his daughter Evelyn put us both up in Arlington Street. There we stayed until Dr. Prescott had introduced me to the faculty at the divinity school, enrolled me as an auditor in the courses and even helped to find me a room in Cambridge. I was thoroughly settled, almost, one might say, hammered down, by the time he returned to Justin. It has been an awesome experience to have found myself the beneficiary of all the energies of the ex-headmaster, but my ultimate reaction has been one of bursting pride. The uneasy feeling that I must make good has been ameliorated by the growing suspicion that I really may.

  Two weeks after his departure he sent me the surviving chapter of Charley Strong’s book. I happened to read it just after attending Dr. Vane’s famous lecture on gnosticism, and the comparison was stimulating. Certainly poor Charley must have been a
curious study in heresy. It is a pity that he could not have written the final chapter of his story and told how Dr. Prescott, in their talks by the Seine, had lifted his eyes from the mortal headmaster to the God in and behind them both. But at least the few pages that he did not destroy show that this ending was possible.

  15

  Charley Strong’s Manuscript (l921)

  IT HAPPENED in Southampton in the summer after my fifth form year. Claude is a cousin of Mummy’s, halfway between our ages, a giddy, discontented old maid who is always trying to put her hands on me and stares in provoking, smiling silence during family meals. When she asked me to come to her bedroom to tell me a “secret,” I went, to find her naked and still smiling. She was shameless and shrill, and the white puffy flesh on her buttocks gave way under my groping fingers as if it had been cotton on sticks. I took it for granted that she would be pregnant and that I would get syphilis. Neither event occurred, but when war came, and mud, they seemed a natural consequence.

  There is very little purity in Paris, and yet the air is pure. There is very little cleanliness about the French, and yet their minds are clean. How the visiting Sunday preachers at Justin dwelt on purity: clean young men and clean young women offering each other unstained bodies in a marriage of true sacrament! Harry Nolan tells me that he and Libby wake up sometimes at night and find themselves consummating the act. I think that in the greenish light of the chapel I must have visualized the wedding night like that. A love that transcends embarrassment, an orgasm that explodes as the Grail is raised to the altar, a naked odorless copulation, passionate but unsweating, before a white surpliced choir, witnessing without concupiscence and bursting into song. Is it not thus that Henry Esmond would copulate? And Prince Albert and the Chevalier Bayard? And even the preachers themselves, old as they are, if they still do it, and my Latin master, Mr. Van Wormser, sitting in the back with his big bony wife in the little straw hat with the silly peonies? Imagine how much of it there is and how blessed!

  People always think me innocent, naïve, good. They whisper things they think I shouldn’t hear. Oh, Charley, sweetie, no, she’s not for you, I’m not for you, you need a nice girl. I am cream chicken and green peas at a children’s party; I am spun sugar and ice cream; I am the peck of a kiss after a subscription dance at the Plaza on a spring vacation. I am confusion and hot, slow tears after a wet dream. Little do they know, giggling by the shoe lockers in the cellar of Lowell House or hiding under the beds while the old women clean the cubicles to look under their skirts, that Charley, who blushes at their stories, Charley whom they delight to shock, pretending to be doing things that even they wouldn’t really do in the showers, Charley who falls asleep at lights and dreams of sports and Mother, this same Charley has no bottom to his voluptuousness. Nay, your wives, your daughters, your matrons and your maids could not fill up the cistern of my lust.

  Hope for redemption can lie only in casting myself at the feet of him whom I have betrayed. For it is he, I know, who made me senior prefect; the upper school’s election is merely advisory, and it is by no means clear that I had a majority. I enjoy the transient popularity of looks and football prowess, and I have no avowed enemies. But I am deemed too much a Christer to be a real leader, and when he told me of my appointment, I trembled and wept at such an act of trust. He it was who baptized and confirmed me, he who talked to me of my doubts and miseries, he who gave me a love that made the shallow, prattling love of shallow, prattling parents seem like the spray on one’s face in a speedboat at sea.

  Yes, hope is only in him. Redemption is only in him. He prefers Saint Augustine to Saint Francis, the Magdalene to Saint Cecilia. He knows that purity is not to be confused with inexperience. Those also are saved who flee from Alexandria to the desert and raise long grey El Greco arms and roll wide white El Greco eyes to a God who glares fiercely over their heads at the flickering light of the about-to-be consumed city revels which they have shrewdly abandoned. I must go to the Cape and leave Southampton; I must abandon Father, Mother and Cousin Claude; I must flee to the Cape to confess and kiss his feet, wash his feet, sit at his feet.

  Daddy cannot understand my leaving in the middle of the season. When I tell him that the Rugby fifth esteemed it the greatest of honors to be asked to Dr. Arnold’s in the summer holidays, he says it is nonsense. Daddy thinks everything is nonsense. There is something eternal about people who think this, and I find it hard to believe when I visualize the gay striped summer waistcoat over the round little belly, the shivering pince-nez, the coughs as he taps his egg at breakfast, a Dickensian Yankee, that Daddy is as dead as ever I shall be, that Mother is a widow on the Riviera and that my sister Alice is an older maid than Claude.

  Daddy concedes that Dr. Prescott may be a great headmaster, but doubts that he is quite a gentleman. Old Boston family? What has that to do with it? King Edward is not a gentleman. The Kaiser is not a gentleman. Very few royalties, indeed, are gentlemen. But Delancey Parker is a gentleman; so is Emlen Rutherfurd. It takes Harvard on top of Justin to make a gentleman. A club on top of God. Never forget that, my boy.

  At Lola’s last week on the Rue de Peur, under a window through which I could see at dawn the fleche of the Sainte-Chapelle, two young men in red silk shirts huddled side by side, arms about each other’s necks. Lola, in one of her moods, had gone to an inner room with a Russian who had parked his taxi below, and outside the door Leo, cigarette dangling, dispassionately waited. These are the innocents. What do they know of the flickering sky over El Greco’s deserts? What do they know of damnation? They were not taught by a master.

  “I am sorry, Charley, for what transpired, particularly that it should have happened in your home, but I suspect there was an element of seduction. Stay up here, my boy, until your cousin has left Southampton. And do not think that life is over because of this. I was not pure when I married. You see how I honor you with my confidence. You could make a good tale of this next term, but you won’t. No, boy, don’t weep. Get up and go out. Walk down the beach and breathe in the Atlantic. Recite Dover Beach if you must. It will go well with your present sentiments. But don’t be late for dinner. Mr. Depew is coming, and I want my senior prefect to entertain him.”

  Had I fornicated only that I might be forgiven?

  When Madame de Genlis returned to Paris after an exile that had lasted a quarter of a century, a period which had encompassed the revolution, the directorate, the consulate and the empire, what struck her most was that ladies who received their callers on the chaise-longue no longer covered their ankles. The couvre-pied had fled with democracy; France had wanted neither one nor the other, and are there grades of importance in the junk pile? Seduction by Claude, forgiveness for seduction by Claude, the love of Prescott and shrapnel in the Argonne.

  Sixth form year! With the sixth behind him Dr. Arnold wouldn’t have traded his job for any in England. I see the blond senior prefect standing on the dais with eye on wristwatch and finger pressing the assembly bell; I see him dashing down the football field, one arm stiffly out, for an eighty-yard gain; I see him singing loudest in the song fest, laughing loudest at the headmaster’s reading of Leacock. He keeps exhorting the lower forms to a greater showing of school spirit and the upper to a greater cooperation with the prefects, until at last he fades through innumerable examples of example giving into a kind of cinema poster of Tom Brown, a puppet to jig about the stage and prattle in a disguised voice, manipulated by five strong fingers behind the curtain, a Faust who has sold his soul to God.

  In the whole process of non-living it is the least lived year, waiting for the emerald green of June with the creamy white parchment and prize books rebound in morocco leather, thinking of graduation first as a day to be dreaded, then as a release and finally as an extinction, not because there is no life after school (though that may be) but because school has sucked out one’s life, and the holy vampire with the arching eyebrows who loves to read Lucretius and Epictetus has taken one’s blood and bones for the cause
(as of course one had begged him to!) and spread upon his green, green campus a fragment of one’s translucent skin, a lock of yellow damp hair.

  That was the life one made love to, was it not; that was the sacrifice one sought, to let the middle-aged god return to his earth and his boys in the guise of one of them, to rejuvenate and redeem his school through the medium of a captive senior prefect? What does it matter that there is nothing left of one when the great spirit moves out of one’s body? Is the process not ecstasy? Or as near it as one would ever come?

  When I think of early communion I always think of it as being in the spring, and I feel the sweet sad tug of a pointless melancholy and the light, exhilarating caress of a warm zephyr against my cheeks as I cross an empty campus to what I hope will be an almost empty chapel. And then I remember the sting of the sour cheap wine on its passage to my empty stomach and the wonderful rumble of the comfortable words. How he could say that word “comfortable”! It seemed to have more syllables than four and to be filled with the biggest of pillows; it suggested a great dark cool leathery gentlemen’s club with discreet silent attendants, visible only because of their white raiment, passing between the half-sleeping members with delectables. And I would close my eyes, kneeling at the altar rail, so tightly that I would see explosions of light and spots of blue, and when the service was over I would go back, faithful hound, to help him with his disrobing and listen mutely to the flow of the day’s instruction.

  “I have noticed, Charley, that Mr. Taylor’s dormitory is habitually late for morning roll call. I have noticed that there are more books overdue in the library, that the back row in the schoolroom was giggling last night at prayers, that there was a fight with tin basins in Mr. Dugdale’s lavatory, that shoes are not always shined, that tongues are not always clean, that minds are spotted and flesh is vile (at least as second formers may conceive it), that virtue has departed from the campus and the great veil in the temple is rent in twain. Do you know who rent it?”