The Rector of Justin

by Louis Auchincloss

  “He did.”

  “We’re always in David’s debt, aren’t we?” He continued to nod, but more in distraction now. “It’s amazing how many people are and how much they mind it. Yet David doesn’t rattle the keys of his prison. I have never figured out if he has deserved much more of life or if he has got all that he had coming to him. But tell me, Brian. You think you’ll stick it now? You think you’ll be ordained?”

  “God willing, sir.”

  “Good boy.” He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sure of it. Work hard, and don’t come back here. I may go to Florida, anyway, next winter. The point is that I don’t want you to see me. Or rather I don’t want you to see what I’m turning into. I hate old age, and I’m becoming a nasty, cantankerous old man. No, I mean it! I’m put off by the merest trifles. I can still see that they’re trifles, but the time may be coming when I won’t. I want you to remember me as I was.”

  “But, sir,” I pleaded, “don’t you see that I need you?”

  “I do not,” he said firmly. “I see that you’re on the verge of becoming a man and that you must go the rest of the way alone. There, isn’t that the Dean’s car calling for you now?”

  I tried to console myself on the ride back to Cambridge with the thought that he did not really mean his interdict, and I was mortified to discover that the weight of the unread manuscript in my lap helped to soften my depression. Is it possible that the acquisitiveness of the collector has reached such a pitch in me that I would rather have the relic than the saint? It has happened before to those who have tried too hard to persuade themselves that they are divinely inspired. Help me, dear Lord, to be moderate.

  17

  Jules Griscam’s Memoir

  WHEN Father named me Jules, after my grandfather Griscam, the black sheep whose evil doings had blotted our escutcheon, he must have felt that he could close the books at last on the dreary tale of the performance of his filial duties. I suppose he had reason to pride himself on having been a good son, but there was no reason for his being so tiresome about it. If I heard the story of those paid debts once, I must have heard it a hundred times! I naturally felt sorry for poor old Grandpa Griscam, whose magnificently delinquent obligations should have been so ignominiously satisfied, and modeled myself from boyhood on a romantic misconception of him. For all the mess I have since made of things I am still glad that I did not do as my brother Sylvester. He modeled himself on Grandpa Prime and became a prize stuffed shirt.

  I have never been in the least congenial with Father. Our philosophies, if either can really be said to have one, are at opposite poles. Yet I will admit that he is a hard man to dislike steadily. He is so damnably reasonable. He has an infinite faith that there is no problem in the world that can’t be solved by sitting down and talking it out. Oh, those talks! He would have talked the heart out of Keats and the sublime gaiety out of Mozart.

  Some basic instinct of self-preservation always made me resist him, as country dwellers resist the intrusion of signposts and hot dog stands into the beauty of the landscape. It is true that he professed to care about art and beauty, but if they ever got through to him at all, it could have been only by the written word. He had no real response to his physical surroundings, in painting or sculpture or even in natural scenery (though he did keep a bird list) and in music he was deaf to all but the noisiest Verdi choruses. Indeed, his worst danger as a Philistine consisted in his efforts not to be one. He was so determined that culture, like calisthenics and tennis lessons, should have its proper place in our lives. The epicurean had to keep step with the puritan down the long aisle to the altar of the well-adjusted God.

  But what Father could never comprehend and what ultimately destroyed his system was that if you put things in pairs, the cruder twin is bound to predominate. I think that he and Mother must have had a subconscious belief that it was all right to be grand if you were uncomfortable, all right to be social if your parties were dull, all right to be extravagant if you bought the second-best. And so we lived in large, drafty stone houses, filled with dubious period furniture, and did a great deal of pointless entertaining of ostensibly “important” citizens.

  The fear that we children would be spoiled was a constant obsession. Sylvester and I slept in a cold gymnasium on top of the city house, and in Northeast Harbor summers, while all our friends were sailing or playing tennis, we had to work on Father’s mainland farm, purchased for the sole purpose of keeping us occupied. Amy, even in her coming-out year, could not dance after midnight on Saturday because Father, an agnostic, saw fit to borrow from the church its disciplines if not its consolations. Similarly, although an active opponent of the Eighteenth Amendment, he welcomed the excuse of its passage to ban all liquor from the house.

  As a family we were un-American to the extent that Father ruled the roost. There was no aspect of our education too trivial for his interminable planning. Mother accepted it all passively, not because she was weak but because she was not interested. She was a terrible disappointment to me, for she would not even pretend to need my passionately professed championship. She was beautiful (or so I thought), stately, remote and lame, the perfect combination for a fanciful boy who wanted to be a knight-errant to a princess in distress. On the rare occasions when Father was unable to control his temper, and it exploded at Mother with a force all the greater for its long suppression, how gladly would I have leaped to her defense had I thought she was in the least affected by the ranting little man at the end of the table!

  But Mother needed nobody’s help; she had her causes: woman suffrage, birth control, the Army of the Holy Word, and she knew that in the period of abject apology that inevitably followed Father’s outbursts she would be offered a large and useful check for her current favorite. She loved humanity, but she looked with a misty, faintly bored benignity towards its individual specimens, even when that specimen happened to be her oldest son. Father was officious and irritating, but at least he cared.

  The romance of his life—and this may explain some of Mother’s domestic apathy—was Dr. Prescott. I am not well enough versed in the new theories of Freud to be able to determine how much of this attraction was sexual; all I know is that his worship of the headmaster was of a jealous, proprietary kind and that it provided him with the only emotional excitement and quickening of the heart that I suspect his dry nature was ever to know. At least, I am sure he did not find such things with his wife and children. I imagine that in his subconscious he must have played at every possible relationship with Prescott: as son, as brother, as lover, as wife. We children naturally resented Father’s hero, not only for the affection lavished upon him at what we felt was our own expense, but for the smallness of its return. For it was obvious that however indebted Prescott was to Father, however even fond of him he might be, Father was still not a “man” as Prescott conceived of one. Sylvester and I as boys in Northeast Harbor, on the great man’s summer visits, shifting restlessly under his deep brown stare and whimsical, rhetorical questions (he was uneasy with children, for like a dictator visiting a free country, he knew that his power was suspended), brooded with a dark foreboding of the great disciplinary factory to which our infatuated father had irrevocably destined us. Dr. Prescott had only to bide his hour, and we would be his.

  Nor was there anything about Justin Martyr, when the hour came, to falsify my apprehension. A handy case of tonsilitis delayed my going for one year, and jaundice for another, cutting my prison term from six to four, but in the fall of 1918 I was duly entered as a third former, and my long duel with Dr. Prescott began. To an egotist of fourteen the mighty events across the Atlantic hardly existed. The holocaust that was ending in Europe was dwarfed by the difficulties of adjusting to the school hierarchy. I was the only “new kid” in my form and ranked socially with those in the two below. What was the agony of the trenches, sublimated as it must have been, according to my wishfully thinking mother, by the wonderful comradeship engendered by shared dangers, to one of my Byronic pri
de who had to endure alone the indignities of hazing? The ultimate humiliation was my family’s assumption that I was homesick. There was surely a difference between homesickness, to which morbid malady I was always a stranger, and a natural, healthy detestation of Justin Martyr!

  My first important discovery was that Dr. Prescott was a master and my father a mere amateur in the great nineteenth century art of making life uncomfortable. “Fun” was defined in terms of group activity, such as football or singing or even praying; the devil lay in wait for the boy alone, or worse, for two boys alone. The headmaster believed that adolescence should be passed in an organized crowd, that authority should never avert its eyes unless the boys were engaged in fighting or hazing or some other activity savage enough to be classified as “manly.” Life beyond the campus was universally suspect: the drugstores, with their sodas and lurid magazines, the slatternly country girls, the very woods and streams that encouraged boys to take long walks and wax sentimental about nature and perhaps each other.

  Where Prescott excelled above all was in his intuition as to where temptation lay. As a young man and an Oxford dandy, he had strolled by the Thames reading Baudelaire and Rossetti. He was widely, and I think justly, reputed to have a perfect ear for music and a fine tongue for wine, and he could actually speak Greek and Latin. Had it not been for the perverted violence of his puritan conscience, he might have been a great artist or at least a great voluptuary. But he had crushed the joy in his own nature, and so far as he could, in those of others, pleading with his angry God to help him, his hands tightly clasped, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, waiting as much as thirty seconds between the prayer that he recited at the end of chapel, and his own thundering “Amen,” knowing, the old ham, that the congregation was reverently watching his silent communion. He would have been a glorious repertory actor of the Henry Irving school, playing Iago one night and Tamburlaine the next.

  Yet he got away with it. My own father is proof of that. If you want to be taken seriously in this life, you must start by taking yourself seriously. Prescott was surrounded with an atmosphere of almost incredible awe, to which the parents, trustees and faculty all contributed. I do not think that many of the boys liked him, but they respected and feared him, which was much more fun, both for them and for him. At least a quarter of the student body, like myself, were sons of graduates and had grown up in his legend. They were proud of his fame, excited by the rumble of his leadership and diverted by his wit, his inconsistencies, even by his sermons. As I have said, he was basically a ham actor, and the school was a captured but still admiring audience.

  I got off to an immediately bad start with everybody by resisting the hazing. The rules of hazing, like those of all activities not protected by law, were exact. One was meant to fight back, but not too hard. One had to resist just the right amount (immediate surrender would have been “flabby”) and then submit, and then, after a fixed period, the hazing ceased. Violent resistance, like violent hazing, was bad form because it brought the masters into an unconstitutional area which by tacit consent had been left to the boys. But I failed to appreciate such delicacies. I fought like a cat with nails and teeth and was so badly beaten up that I had to spend two days in the infirmary. Dr. Prescott, who had hitherto ignored me—afraid, perhaps, that I would presume on his friendship with Father—came to see me and was gruffly sympathetic, but I suspect that he had already spotted me as one of those who would never fit in. Had I deliberately incited my formmates to mayhem to give his school a bad reputation? Perhaps Father had warned him that I was capable of it.

  The hazing came ultimately to an end, burnt out by its very intensity, and I found myself suddenly and blessedly left alone, ignored now by boys who believed that the silent treatment was the hardest of all to endure. They did not comprehend that they had left me a New England sky and ultimately a New England spring, a library with all the poetry I could want, woods to hike in and occasionally another maverick to befriend. It was thus that I came to know Chanler Winslow, a strange, blond, lazy, quiet boy who, although handsome and athletically competent, was shunned by the others as “crazy.” Chanler was very slow and had abominable grades; he was surly and unsociable, and he had a murderous temper that, unlike my own, was widely feared. He would not, for example, have hesitated to use a knife if attacked. He liked me because I asked nothing of him and because we shared a passion for the out-of-doors.

  It was still the era when boys were allowed to have huts in the woods, and there were a number of these along the Lawrence River, two miles from the school, made of timber and old shingles and used on Sunday afternoons and holidays. The privilege dated from one of Dr. Prescott’s rare sabbatical leaves in the tenure of an indulgent substitute, and it was known that the headmaster was waiting for the first infringement of his many regulations of the huts to abolish them. For what were they but a challenge to his theory of moral protection in crowded living, a defiant community of independent Thoreaus camped on the very border of his village of robots? Chanler and I built the biggest hut of all and furnished it with an old rug and some wicker chairs purchased from a local junk shop. Had we been allowed to keep it I think I might have finished my career at Justin Martyr without ignominy.

  For the hut was helping me to become a man by absorbing and dignifying my resentment of the school. When Chanler and I sat on the banks of the turgid Lawrence, chewing grass and watching the kingfishers plunge for their prey, or when we fished ourselves or climbed trees looking for eggs, or even when we lay on our backs and watched the clouds and the triangles of ducks and geese, far from the nervous atmosphere of ringing bells and hurrying feet, I could pity rather than despise the old man who thought that boys went to the woods only to smoke or drink or masturbate.

  But that old man and I were not to be allowed to pass each other like ships in the night. An officious young master, the kind of twisted sadist that is the bane of secondary school education, hoping to curry favor with the Rector, spent a weekday afternoon searching the empty huts and discovered three cigarette butts. It was flimsy evidence of illicit smoking, for there were always tramps in the neighborhood, but Dr. Prescott had waited a long time, and he must have decided that it was as good as he was likely to get. The next morning at roll call he announced that the huts were to be dismantled before the end of the week.

  For the first and last time in my life I tried honestly to reason with him. That night after supper I asked for an interview and was told to go to his study at nine. When I knocked at the appointed hour and heard his deep, weary “Come in, boy,” and, coming in, saw him leaning over the great square desk so that the one burning light illuminated his broad gleaming forehead and rich crop of gray hair, I knew that the stage had been set on which only his victories could be played. Was it a coincidence that the corners of the room and the big busts of the Roman emperors in the surrounding book cases were shrouded in darkness, so that Prescott was the center of what dim light there was? Was it chance that the stillness was in such dramatic contrast to the noises of the school? Was it unintentional that the few objects on that expanse of mahogany surface should have been of heavy gold: a cross, a fish, a miter and a paperweight that was a crude replica of Trinity Church in Boston?

  I told him, as he gravely listened, that I thought it unjust that all the huts should have to pay for the sin, if sin it was, of one. I insisted that our activities had been innocent. I protested that even my father encouraged us to stay out-of-doors.

  “Out-of-doors, exactly,” Dr. Prescott interrupted with a whimsical smile. “I am not interfering with the out-of-doors. In fact, by removing the roof of your hut I am removing a bar between you and heaven.”

  I returned at this to the safer ground of the injustice of making many pay the fault of one.

  “But, my dear boy, that is exactly the injustice of life,” he pointed out. “All the German people are now paying for the fault of the Kaiser and his advisers. All members of a football team are penalized if one is offside. But mo
re fundamentally—yes, Jules, much more fundamentally—we all share in original sin. And why not? Why should we pay only for our own little crimes? Isn’t there something petty and avaricious in such a plea?” Here Dr. Prescott looked up and seemingly through me, in the pose of one alone, struggling with his despised mortality. “Why should another man be hanged for a murder that I was never tempted to commit? Is it anything but coincidence that I am not a thief? Or a perjurer? I sometimes think it would be impossible for any of us to suffer injustice. That our greatest blessing lies in the sins we have not been led to commit.”

  “But, surely, sir, you would not walk into the schoolroom and give a black mark to the first boy you saw on the ground that he might smoke if he had the opportunity!”

  Dr. Prescott smiled, and his smile, I admit, was charming. “No. But I might remove the opportunity. And that is why the huts must go.”

  “You mean Winslow and I must really tear down our hut? Ourselves?”

  The smile faded, and the brown eyes searched me gravely. He had taken in my note of desperation, and he knew that he could either allow me a dignified retreat or provoke me to a stand that would involve my expulsion from the school. Did he wish to lance the ulcer that I represented? Or let it naturally disappear? His eyes became for a moment quizzical, and then he glanced away.

  “I understand, Jules, that you and Winslow have exercised much industry and imagination in the adornment of your hut. I appreciate that it would be distressing for you to carry out the work of demolition personally. I am not, whatever you boys may think, totally devoid of delicate feeling. I will make arrangements for your hut to be taken down by others. Good night, Jules. Please remember me to your parents when next you write. They are well, I trust?”

  “Perfectly well, sir.”