December 1. I have not made an entry now for two weeks. I have been troubled, and my mind has not been clear as to which of two is the real reason. Is it that I feel that our Wednesday night sessions are dangerous to the welfare of the school or is it that I feel they are not? In other words, am I worried for the school or for us? Wouldn’t I rather see Dr. Prescott, if he must play an active role, howl like the anguished Lear in the tempest and ultimately bring ruin to all, so that the usurpers and the dethroned perish in a single fifth act cataclysm? Wouldn’t that be better than to have him preside, like an addled old field marshal, over a council of disgruntled royalists who have dragged him from retirement to envelop their shabby plans in the musty glory of his ribbons and banners? Yes, in the last analysis, do I not care for Dr. Prescott far more than for his school? Would I not rather have him lethal than absurd? I cannot bear the picture of his gravely nodding head as Pierre discusses the iniquities of Mr. Moore’s new project of having the boys wait on table.
Yet what can I do? I tried on one of our walks to hint that Pierre and Eric were carping critics. “Oh, yes, of course,” he muttered impatiently, “but their hearts are in the right place. That’s the great thing.”
He would not go on with the topic, and when I left him, he remarked dryly that I did not have to come to Pierre’s unless I chose to. I assured him that I did so choose, and that is true. For I love Dr. Prescott, if that is not too presumptuous a term, more than anyone in the world. I cannot bear to be away from his side in time of trouble, even if I can only observe. All my life I have been an observer, and now, when I crave to act, to interfere, to stop something, it is ironical that I am compelled to go on in my old role.
December 3. Mr. Moore came up behind me on our way from morning chapel to the Schoolhouse and put his long arm around my shoulders. He is always very friendly, but one feels that he is constantly having to overcome a naturally cold nature. Still he tries, and I believe that he tries sincerely.
“I hear you’ve been having some interesting sessions at Pierre’s,” he said cheerily. “I bet I wouldn’t have been a very happy fly had I found myself on that wall!”
I was so mortified that I could only stammer something completely inarticulate, and Mr. Moore’s smile became tighter as did his grasp on my shoulder. “Don’t get mixed up in something you’re going to regret, Brian,” he warned me in a lower voice. “I’m hoping you’ll go far at Justin. Leave campus politics alone, my boy. Believe me, that’s good advice.”
I was paralyzed by his kindness. What could I possibly say? That our little meetings were not conspiratorial? That I attended them only with reluctance? I was too embroiled in disloyalty to be able to affirm my allegiance without seeming to betray my cohorts. And how could I betray Dr. Prescott?
It was an impossible situation, and on our walk that afternoon I was almost able to tell Dr. Prescott so. I finally found the courage to suggest that he did not fully assess the effect of his own personality on others and that he might be pushing Pierre and Eric into an overt opposition of the headmaster. He was very upset and paused to pound the earth with his walking stick.
“I tell you, Brian, you’re a fusspot!” he exclaimed. “We’re only trying to devise a way to save what is best in Justin. This is not disloyalty. If I make a report, it will be to the trustees of the school, of whom, as ex-headmaster, I am one.”
“But your prestige is such that a report might ruin Mr. Moore,” I protested. “The trustees and the graduates would be behind you. Too much behind you.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dr. Prescott said gloomily. “The old are soon forgotten. But even if it were so, I must take my chances. What you must learn, Brian, if you are to be an effective priest, is that you belong to the church militant and that means you have to fight! I think I could have put up with anything from Mr. Moore but the depreciation of Justin Martyr as a church school. Do you know, there are six Roman Catholic boys in the present first form? And that they are excused from chapel!”
“They go to mass in the village.”
“But we’re a church school, Brian, that’s what you forget. That’s what all of you forget today.”
“Yet you took Catholic boys yourself, sir.”
“Reluctantly. And only on strict conditions.” Dr. Prescott set his jaw in a new way to which I was beginning to become accustomed. “When some infatuated graduate, forgetting his manhood, signed away the right to bring up his sons in his own faith and then in sober afterthought came to beg me with tears in his eyes—yes, tears, Brian—to take his boy in Justin . . . well, I relented and took the boy. I let the graduate have his cake and eat it. But the boy had to attend every chapel service and every sacred studies class!”
“And Jewish boys?”
“They were offered the same conditions. But I’ll say this for them. The conditions were never accepted.”
“Then all your Jewish boys were converts?”
“They were Christians, Brian!” Dr. Prescott thundered. “I have never admitted the word ‘Jew’ as any but a religious term. Of course, you’ll ask me about Negroes next. That, I admit, is a tougher problem. But I can tell you this. If I found Negro boys who could really profit from Justin and Justin from them, I’d take them. But I’d never take just one, or maybe two, to wear as feathers in my liberal cap!”
It was known on the campus that Mr. Moore was considering a Negro boy for next year’s first form. I was afraid of provoking Dr. Prescott into an even more open denunciation of his successor and drew his attention hastily to the fact that it was beginning to snow. He shook his head moodily and plodded on ahead of me towards his house.
December 10. I have had a vicious flu and been a week in the infirmary. Everyone has been very nice about it, though it plays havoc with the curriculum. But what has set me back much more than my own sense of physical unworthiness was a visit that I received from Pierre Dahlgren. He sat by my bed and gave me the gossip of the week, filling the stuffy air of my room with smoke and chuckles, and I lay back on my pillows, my eyes half closed, murmuring positives or negatives as required until he said something that made me sit up.
He was discussing the great plans for the school’s diamond jubilee that is to be celebrated in the early spring, an event that is expected to bring to the campus a great troup of graduates. Dr. Prescott, of course, is to be the last speaker at the principal banquet, and of his speech Pierre had the following to say, after leaning forward to see that no one was listening in the corridor:
“I wish you could have been at our last Wednesday meeting. I think that Dr. Prescott’s address will come as a bit of a bombshell.”
“A bombshell? Oh, Pierre, should it be?”
Pierre placed his fingers on his lips as we heard the sound of the nurse’s heels in the corridor. “It is the perfect, perhaps the last chance,” he whispered gravely, “for the affirmation of our ancient faith!”
It was a relief to have the nurse come in and stick the thermometer abruptly between my lips so I did not have to answer. All that I can do now is to go to Mr. Griscam. For he, thank God, is my opposite. He knows when and how to act.
21
Brian’s Journal
JANUARY 22, 1946. I have told Mr. Griscam everything, and he has promised, as I knew he would, to take the needed steps to head off Pierre Dahlgren’s little plot. But my visit to the Griscams in the Christmas holidays has produced another and much more extraordinary result: I have been instrumental in raising a great sum of money for Justin Martyr. Among the various small services that I have hoped to do for the school I never dreamed of a financial one. Life is certainly bizarre.
My visit has also had a private significance, being the first time that I have felt accepted by adults as a minister. I had gone straight from divinity school back to Justin where I had to do only with the boys, who made little distinction between ministers and masters, and with the faculty, who continued to see me as the same old Brian Aspinwall with a quixotically reversed collar. But
in Sixty-eighth Street the Griscams treated me as a figure of more stature, and I hope I did not let them down too badly. I have a terrible tendency to think of myself as a minister in a play. Please, God, help me to lower that curtain!
They were much the same as in 1941 and greeted me with much the same enthusiasm. Mrs. Griscam was deeper than ever in the affairs of her “army” and was now giving it (I gathered from one of her husband’s dry asides) every dollar that he had not hidden away in trust. Amy was still vociferous and firm in her opinions; Sylvester, still separated but undivorced from his second wife. And their father was still wearing the same patient air of the man who has to unravel the knotted affairs of an ungrateful universe. Only, like the gods of Valhalla after the abduction of Freia, they all seemed a bit graver and older. I am afraid that the war must have provided their spirit of youth.
Sylvester was particularly friendly and made me, early in my visit, the embarrassed confidant of his matrimonial troubles.
“When I married Faith—that was my first wife—I was really only a kid. You won’t believe me, Brian, but I’d never even kissed another girl.”
“Why shouldn’t I believe you?”
Sylvester’s pause was only momentary. “Well, I suppose you were always religious, even as a boy. Not that it isn’t a very fine thing to be. But as a minister you’ll have to hear all kinds of things. We may as well start making you a man of the world.” He laughed in his loud, cheerful, rather forced fashion. “Take it from me, my friend, it’s extremely unusual for a lad of twenty to have kissed only one girl. You see, I’d been engaged to Faith since I was fourteen.”
“But you were only a child! Surely, your parents didn’t countenance such a thing?”
“Oh, they thought it was cute. Faith’s parents were their best friends and all that kind of thing. We were trapped in a family valentine. Not really trapped, of course. But that’s how kids are. We thought it was expected of us. Dad and Mother didn’t see that I needed anything more than Faith. They’ve never had any interest in sex themselves.”
“That’s what we tend to think about our parents,” I cautioned him. “But it’s not always true.”
“Oh, I suppose they were normal for their generation.” Sylvester shrugged and poured himself more brandy. We were sitting in the dining room alone after a long Sunday lunch. Mrs. Griscam had retired to the parlor, and Mr. Griscam and Amy were playing backgammon in the library. “Though how normal was Dad, I sometimes wonder, when he proposed to a lame girl who happened to be the boss’s daughter?”
“Sylvester,” I protested, “please remember I’m his guest!”
Sylvester smiled complacently into his brandy glass and sniffed its contents with a heavy sniff. He was obviously delighted to have shocked me. People, I am learning, like to shock ministers. “A little realism implies no lack of respect, Brian. I still obey the fifth commandment. All I’m saying is that Dad and Mother have sublimated their sexual urges to higher things. Dad has Justin Martyr. Mother has the Army of the Holy Word. Fine. But poor little Sylvester didn’t have either, and he had some pretty basic needs. After fifteen years of tepid wedlock, when he suddenly met a secretary at the bank called Estelle . . . !” Sylvester leaned over to put a hand on my shoulder and whisper in my shrinking ear: “Brian, my boy, I tell you I woke up to sex like a giggling freshman on his first visit to a whorehouse!”
“I suppose that’s the trouble with young marriages,” I murmured uncomfortably.
Sylvester nodded his solemn agreement as he sat back to continue his brandy. “Well, I admit Dad was a trump about it. He didn’t like Estelle. Nobody liked Estelle. Only I was blind enough not to see what a bitch she was. Yes, Brian,” he repeated gravely as he saw me wince, “my second wife was a bitch. But Dad put up my alimony and made it possible for me to marry her. It wasn’t a year before I had to walk out.”
“Had to?”
“If I wanted to preserve my sanity, that is. You could never conceive in your wildest dreams, Brian, what things went on.”
“You mean she was . . . unfaithful to you?”
“A word like ‘unfaithful’ is a cataclysmic understatement to describe the activities of a woman like Estelle.” Sylvester almost smacked his lips as he said this. I couldn’t help wishing that it wasn’t quite so much fun to impress the innocent. “But don’t think I can prove it—not a single act! She’s as smart as Satan and can smell a detective ten miles off. No, she’s still Mrs. Sylvester Griscam, five years later, and will be until I ante up a million bucks.”
“A million!” I gasped. I had read of such settlements, but only in the tabloids.
“Don’t worry, she won’t get it. She’s got herself a shyster lawyer who likes the sound of big sums. She’ll settle for a quarter of that amount. But the point is: where do I get the quarter?”
I could not imagine that Sylvester had come to me for financial advice, but as he continued to stare at me expectantly, I finally asked him why he needed a divorce at all.
“Because I want to marry Doris Drinker!” he exclaimed, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Perhaps you’d better tell me about Doris Drinker,” I suggested with a sigh. “That is, if I’m to be any help. Though I don’t see how I can.”
“You’ll see.” Once again his hand was on my shoulder, and once again his voice sank confidentially. “Brian, this little Doris of mine is the wonder of wonders. She was a Wave at Fifty Church Street where I did my stint in the war and the brightest one in the whole office. She didn’t know a thing about the Griscams or Dad being an ambassador or any of that rot. To her I was just plain Lieutenant Commander Griscam, another guy in the service. And there hasn’t been any rinky-dink, either. No sirree. One good-night kiss on the doorstep has been my ration from the beginning.”
Looking at poor Sylvester, so thin and plain and lanky, so heavy of breath and emphasis, so clumsily sincere, I thought of Mr. Griscam’s passion for perfection and felt sorry for both of them.
“Maybe when your father understands about Doris, he’ll be willing to put up Estelle’s settlement.”
“Not a chance. He put up for Faith, and he’s sworn he won’t do it again. The only hope is Mother. There’s a way she can get at her trust with my consent. I’m the trustee, you see. She always wants money for her holy army. Very well, then.” Here he suddenly gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Do you sniff a way that I can give the old girl what she wants if I get what I need?”
“But, Sylvester, is that honest?”
“Oh, it’s honest enough. As trustee I have what is called a power to invade principal for her benefit. But Dad will regard any exercise of that power as highway robbery. He thinks that to let principal out of the family is to be . . . well . . .”
“Unprincipled,” I finished for him. “Yes, I’m sure he’ll be angry, but what can he do?”
“Oh, there’s always something he can do. That’s why I want you to talk to him.” Sylvester’s tone became eager again. “Please do it, Brian. You have a way with him. He’ll take anything from you.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Why he even gave up his plan of writing a life of Dr. Prescott because he saw you’d do it better! What more proof do you need?”
“But, Sylvester, there were other reasons for that.”
“Come and talk to Mother, then.”
We found Mrs. Griscam in the parlor, sitting straight and apparently serene on a pink bergère against a tapestry of blues and greens that depicted an eighteenth century French hunting scene. But there was something about her straightness, even in the flowing silks that enveloped her (she dressed exquisitely, but as women who dress for a cause) that seemed to repudiate, to shoo away as idle and silly any suggestion of a Pompadour or even of a Lespinasse. As she talked I noted for the first time a slight tremor in her tone.
“I don’t want you to think, Brian, that we’d be doing anything wrong. It was my money that went into that trust, and it will be my money that comes ou
t. Sylvester’s father can have no just cause for complaint.”
“I suppose he cares very deeply that you should be well provided for.”
“But I am well provided for, that’s just the point! My husband has very grand standards. We could all live on a fraction of what he’s got. Do you think I need this big house? Why, I’d be happier in three rooms.”
Yes, I saw them, those three little rooms, dusky and elegant, polished and neat and efficient, with a small residue of the best bibelots, and Mrs. Griscam writing checks on the cash saved at her slender-legged escritoire. And I saw Sylvester and Doris, happy in a Tudor cottage in Rye and Amy traveling from horse show to horse show. They needed money—oh, yes, they needed plenty of money, more money than I could even visualize—but they didn’t need the heavy minted coin in which Mr. Griscam sought to entomb them. They didn’t need, or in the least want, the big solid stone house, the shiny town car with the spoked wheels, the thick glass-grilled doors, the pompous porte-cochere, all the external paraphernalia of wealth without which men of Mr. Griscam’s generation couldn’t quite believe it existed. Poor Mr. Griscam, he had provided all the things that nobody wanted because, as the child of a bankrupt, he couldn’t even take in the fact that everybody did not need, like himself, the constant consolation of marble pillars!
The only thing I could do for them, I concluded, was to bring the inevitable to a head. I had to find in my pity the courage for that. “Let me talk to him, then.”
“Tell him it is God’s will.”
What sort of lives were these? Yet over their dryness and desolation Mrs. Griscam’s fanaticism (if I can call it that) seemed to rise with the pale radiance of a Ryder moon.
Sylvester, like a little boy, had to bring any projected act to immediate fruition. As I had been dragged to the parlor, so now was I dragged to the library. Amy was induced to leave the backgammon table as she finished a game on the excuse that her mother wanted her, and Sylvester hurried out of the room on her heels.
The Rector of Justin Page 29
