Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Do you think it hurt horribly to be burned alive?” He put the question suddenly to his mother as they walked after the service to where the car was waiting. “Or do you suppose the smoke asphyxiated you before it got too bad?”

  “Good heavens, is that what you were thinking about during that lovely singing?”

  He came as near as he ever had to snapping at her. The cathedral had made him almost desperate. “Isn’t it what your religion is all about?”

  “My religion, child? What are you talking about? I guess it’s time, after all, that you went to boarding school. Grandpa will teach you that religion is love!”

  5. CHIP

  THEY HAD DELAYED sending him to Saint Luke’s because they feared, even under the beneficent supervision of Grandpa Berwind, the contamination of boarding school. Yet they recognized that to have attended one would be almost a social necessity at Yale, and they figured that two years might be enough.

  Chip was relieved to get away. He could breathe at Saint Luke’s, away from Benedict and Benedicts, even though the other boys complained constantly of the restrictions. To him the long oblong buildings of gray limestone that formed a square around the dark Gothic chapel were relieved of the dreariness that others ascribed to them by the way they blended into the gray autumnal woods that stretched down a low incline to the sluggish river and the deserted boathouse and dock. Chip liked to walk along the bank alone of a Sunday afternoon, the silence interrupted only by cawing crows or the rush of a startled duck or the deep throb of the chapel bells, his heart moved, not unpleasantly, with a vague melancholy.

  Indeed, had his grandfather not been headmaster, the two years at Saint Luke’s might have been almost unalloyed pleasure. But there was never any getting away from this relationship or the obligations that it entailed. It was not that Mr. B, as Grandpa Berwind was addressed by all, singled him out for favoritism. Far from it. In public, in class, “Benedict, C.” was treated exactly like any other boy of the three hundred, if not more gruffly. But there were also the private sessions, once a month, in the headmaster’s study, where Chip was subject to the scrutinizing stare and careful interrogation of the grave little man whose undemonstrative but still felt love for his only grandson added uncomfortably to all that seemed expected of the boy.

  “Have you heard from your dear mother? And your father? I trust they are well. They do not write so often now, knowing that you are here to supply me with their news.”

  So the sessions always started, and the personal note was then dismissed, reserved for summer vacations in Maine, when Mr. B, transformed into a chuckling grandpa, oddly attired in white flannels and a loud blazer, adored by younger sisters, would fill the Benedict household with bustling activity and merriment. For all his seventy-five years and plump, diminutive figure, he would still take his turn at the tiller in the catboat, light a fire out of nothing at a picnic and lead the family and friends in a singsong on Saturday nights. But at school, in chapel, in the pulpit, swaying to and fro to emphasize his moral points, the rich, melodious voice pouring forth his silver sentences, those gray eyes flashing in awesome sternness, he was a saint, an angel, God even. But why did Chip have to be the only boy with God for a grandfather?

  Mr. B seemed almost aware of this at times, sitting in the big study with the pictures of crews and the prints of Roman monuments, with Chip on the other side of the desk-table, all subdued attention.

  “It is not easy to be a boy, Charles. You will think of my own youth as something very far in the past, lost no doubt in the mists of antiquity, and yet it seems to me like yesterday. I did not, like your dear father, have the temptations of wealth to cope with. I was a poor boy in Worcester who had to help my father in his hardware store. Still, there were Saturdays, and I sometimes fell in with the bad boys of the town. But I always bore in mind what our good pastor, who took it on himself to put me through the theological seminary, used to say: ‘When you marry, Peter, you will be a happy man if you bring a clean body to a pure woman.’ ”

  Chip could not imagine sex with a pure woman. He had a momentary vision of his grandfather and the grandmother whom he had never known reaching gingerly for each other in a discreetly darkened chamber. Those thoughts again ! But there was never the smallest doubt in his mind that Mr. B was right and that the boys who insisted in locker room sessions that a virgin husband would prove a sad hacker on the wedding night were wrong, or at least irrelevant. The world, indeed, was made up of a crude majority that was always wrong and a handful of saints. But the saints were saved.

  Mr. B had not long been headmaster. The bulk of his lengthy tenure at the school had been as chaplain, and he had been elevated to the first position only upon the unexpected demise of his predecessor and then only as a temporary appointment, pending the selection of a permanent principal. But as the trustees had had difficulty in agreeing on a candidate, and as it was the consensus of the faculty and parents that Mr. B was doing a great job, the modest little gentleman of seventy was at last drafted for the supreme post. He could hardly refuse; the school had been his life. His wife had died forty years earlier, giving birth to their only child, Chip’s mother, whose husband was the school’s board chairman. So Mr. B had bowed his head and accepted the call and had then proceeded to administer his institution with a vigor and dignity that astonished the New England academic community. He seemed, single-handedly, to rebut the accent on youth of the nineteen thirties.

  In the great depression every premise had seemed to fail. The words of the creed and of the commandments cracked on the marble wall. People began to ask if Saint Luke’s and all the other preparatory schools were not anachronisms. But Mr. B was a beacon on a stormy night at sea. His light may have flickered in the tempest, but it was always visible. He preached from the pulpit of the school chapel and from others in schools throughout New England that the Sermon on the Mount was the same infallible guide it had always been, reminding boys that if their Father’s house did not contain many mansions, He would have told them. Chip listened, rapt, to the lilting, hypnotic tone of the great sermons.

  “‘Ask and ye shall receive!’ Our Lord did not say, ‘Ask and maybe ye shall receive.’ He did not even say, ‘Ask and very probably ye shall receive.’ No, there it is, boys, plain and literal: ‘Ask and ye shall receive.’ But you must know what to ask for. Our Lord was not concerned with baubles. He was not promising tickets on the fifty-yard line to the Harvard-Yale game or a new motorcar on graduation. Certainly not. But if you want the big things, boys, if you want the crown jewels of life, if you want consolation when you lose a loved one, or hope when you are down, or if, God forbid, you ever find yourselves in the trenches and yearn for courage, then, boys, ask and ye shall receive!”

  Chip did not make the error, because his parents and Mr. B were both on the side of the angels, of putting them in the same boat. He remembered overhearing one of his father’s sisters saying to another that their brother had been a “great match” for the daughter of a poor schoolteacher. Not that he thought for a minute that either of his parents would have agreed with so vulgar an assessment. On the contrary, his father, who had been a senior monitor of Saint Luke’s in his own sixth-form year, had always professed not only to have married “far above himself,” but to have been bold indeed in taking from poor Mr. B the young woman who had constituted his entire family. But there was nonetheless detectable to Chip the faintest hint of amiable condescension in the way his tall, spare, bony, tweedy father greeted the clerical pedagogue. Elihu Benedict was like a warrior bound for the battlefield who kneels for the priestly blessing in full awareness that the church must depend on his sword. What was it but the ancient division between church and state, emperor and pope, except that Chip’s father was not waiting in the snow outside Canossa and Mr. B hurled no anathemas?

  Sometimes, too, when Chip, on his way to class or chapel, would spot across the campus the long, lanky figure of his plain but imposing mother, smiling graciously at Academe as sh
e moved in easy strides beside the briskly stepping, diminutive figure of her venerable parent, the boy would reflect that even the women from the great outside managerial world were inclined to feel protective about the priests of the supposedly almighty.

  But it was not up to him, Chip, to envelop himself in the mantle of that immune adult region until he should take his place there. Saint Luke’s now stretched to the horizon, encompassing all his vision. He thought that he loved his grandfather, if what he felt was indeed love, and he thought that his love was returned, but what good was that if it was based on fraud? Mr. B did not know Chip; he did not know the pollution and callousness of his grandson’s mind. If he did, those gray, luminous eyes would fill first with incredulity, then with horror. The hands would be raised in surprise and shock, and Chip would depart into weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  He got on well enough with his classmates. His blond good looks, his facility in athletics, his quiet amiability, ensured that. But his tendency to solitude aroused some antagonism in those who saw in the smallest aloofness from the crowd a note of criticism, even of snobbishness. Why did he spend so much time in the library reading the adventure stories of Dumas and S.J. Weyman? Why did he go on bird walks alone on Sunday afternoons? Had he not been known to sit by himself in the empty chapel listening to Mr. Tobin, the music master, practicing fugues on the organ? Did not even Mr. B, whose faith nobody doubted, imply that religion “took” only when two or three were gathered together in “thy name”? God and Christ had no use for loners, for the “moony”; they favored the playing fields. And, anyway, religion was for the old, the dying. The boys, like Chip’s own parents, seemed to believe that the spiritual side of Saint Luke’s, and even Mr. B himself, belonged to the category of elegant, precious things that it was the privilege of private school patrons to acquire and that constituted, indeed, a kind of badge of American upper-classness, but that could never be considered in quite the same category as the realities of the marketplace.

  Yes, Chip saw this. And he heard enough of what was said in the locker rooms and after lights in the dormitory to know that the heated luxury of private fantasies that seemed at times about to burst the very walls of his head apart was not peculiar to him. Yet he still suspected that his visions were filthier, his Venusberg more obscene. It was true that Mr. B in sacred studies had scoffed at the Calvinist idea that a man could be saved or damned at birth. Mr. B was saved; there was no question about that; but did those who were saved necessarily know those who were not?

  The headmaster himself took note of his grandson’s escapes to solitude with a gentle but definite concern.

  “You read many novels, Charles,” he observed at one of their sessions. “Are you seeking something in fiction? Or do you simply like a good yarn?”

  “I think I like, sir, to be taken out of myself for a bit.”

  “Well, that’s understandable. A school is so full of ringing bells and barking masters that a boy must wish to get away from time to time. But stories can be an evasion. They can even be a kind of drug. I don’t suggest that in your case they are. I simply put the idea on the table.”

  “Mr. Terhune, in English class last week, described Saint Luke as our first novelist. He said he was the author of the Acts as well as of his own Gospel.”

  Mr. B seemed to weigh this. “That is believed by many scholars. The style is similar and certainly very beautiful. But I trust Mr. Terhune did not suggest that Saint Luke invented his Gospel.”

  “Oh, no, sir! He said it was more like an historical novel.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Chip had had a vague notion that if he could find a novel in the New Testament, it might bring Gospels into a relation with the fiction that he was reading and that this relation might somehow be used to bridge the gap between his grandfather’s pure visions and the boys in the locker room. But now he saw that Mr. B was not going to allow this. There was no bridging that gap. It yawned like outer space between the sun and bipeds on the earth’s surface.

  And then there occurred a violent episode that emphasized even more strongly the separate worlds in which he and his grandfather were destined to move. Chip was too strong and agile to have much trouble with boys who liked to implement even a passing hostility with their fists, and on the rare occasions when he had been so challenged he had acquitted himself in a manner that did not invite others. Indeed, it was felt by some that he did too well. The moment he realized that the wrong was on the other side, he gave in to a sudden eruption of violent rage that had a kind of joy to it. On one occasion he even had to be pulled off his opponent by the alarmed spectators. But in the Stratton affair he was not challenged, personally. He was a volunteer.

  It happened in the gymnasium shower room. Stratton, a shy, inhibited boy who too obviously destested public nudity, was being made cruel fun of by a rowdy group of his formmates, who pretended to see in him a naked female intruding on the scene of their ablutions. When the intensity of his embarrassment caused him to have an erection, which he sought desperately to cover, his towel was snatched away, and he was pelted with bars of soap. At this point Chip intervened. By the end of the scuffle one boy, whose head Chip had bashed against the tile wall of the shower room, had to be taken to the infirmary, and Chip that evening found himself alone with his grandfather in the latter’s study.

  “I am sure you will be relieved to hear, Charles, that Johnson has not had a concussion. Will you tell me, please, how this unseemly brawl began?”

  “They were being mean to Stratton, sir. I thought I’d better help him.”

  “How were they being mean to Stratton?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you, sir.”

  “I see.” How those pale gray eyes stared! Was it conceivable that Mr. B could visualize such things? No, it was not conceivable. “Why, Charles, did you feel that you had to help him?”

  “They were being very bad, sir.”

  “But is it your function to correct badness? Shouldn’t you have called a prefect or master?”

  “But that would have been snitching!”

  “Sometimes it may be manly to snitch.”

  “Anyway, sir, there wasn’t time.”

  After a considerable silence Mr. B continued gravely, “Why is it, my boy, that you feel compelled to correct so violently the badness in others?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “Is it possible, do you suppose, that you may be seeking to correct some badness in yourself?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” Chip repeated, miserably.

  Mr. B’s sigh seemed to indicate that he gave it up. “Well, remember, please, that you are strong. Think, before you raise your hand to another, that you may hurt him sorely. I do not wish, Charles, to hear of another incident like this.”

  When the great west window in the chapel, showing the warrior saints in all their fiery glory, Saint Joan, Saint George, Saint Louis, and the fighting kings, David, Joshua, Saul, was dedicated to the memory of the twenty Saint Luke’s boys who had perished in the Great War, Mr. B, who had shared their hell as an army chaplain, was particularly eloquent.

  “It is not fashionable today to say there is a right or a wrong side in war, much less to claim that God Himself ever chooses sides. But I impenitently believe that God was with the Allies in 1917. It was my privilege to have been at the front with our boys and I knew He was with us! It was not that grave wrongs had not been perpetrated by the Allied Nations in dealing with their empires and with other countries. But when our troops went over the top to stem the advance of German aggression, then, at that point anyway, boys, God was with us! You couldn’t have been there, you couldn’t have seen what they did and how they died, without feeling it! Oh, true, God never forgot the Germans, and He loves them, too—every bit as much as He loves us—but He didn’t want them to win!”

  At that moment Chip wished that he could have been one of those boys who had fought and died in France. So brave an ending might have redeemed him. For
surely among the millions who had perished in the mire of the trenches there must have been some who had burned with his lusts: lust for naked girls, lust for naked boys, lust for self; and afflicted with his doubts: doubts of Mummie, doubts of Daddy, doubts of God. He had no doubts of Mr. B, but wasn’t Mr. B an innocent? What did he know of hell?

  6. CHIP

  CHIP HAD an initial distrust of the boys from New York City, who made up almost half his class, but it was a feeling that he could relax in favor of any individual who proved to be friendly. He had been brought up not to accept the superior airs of the big city; his parents had always emphasized that to hail from Benedict was every bit as good as being one of the teeming millions of Manhattan, if not better. Nor was this simply a question of being a bulky frog in an exiguous puddle. It was a question of living in a fine, clean, God-fearing town, surrounded by a beautiful countryside and blessed with breathable air, as opposed to a gray metropolis reeking with false pride and falser values. And, anyway, the Benedicts could call themselves New Yorkers, if it came to that; the company maintained a floor in a hotel on Madison Avenue where they could stay whenever they wished.

  But New Yorkers had a horrid way of making people feel like hicks; Chester “Chessy” Bogart was a perfect example of this. He came from undistinguished origins—he was a scholarship boy—and although an adequate athlete on the rare occasions when he chose to be, he was short, with a square bulldog countenance, thick black hair and malicious, grinning dark eyes. Yet his self-confidence was supreme; he made fun of everybody and fought like a tiger when his victims tried to beat him up. He sneered at all the accepted school values, used filthy language and earned the grudging respect of some of his classmates by the graphic way in which he described how he had “had” two girls at a summer camp when he was only fourteen.