Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  His mocking overture of friendship to Chip was certainly unconventional: “I guess you’re the kind of guy my old man sent me here to meet. Handsome, wealthy and aristocratic!”

  Chip was mildly shocked. He had been reared to believe that it was vulgar to refer to people’s money. And if you did, you said they were “rolling,” never “wealthy.”

  “Why is Benedict any more aristocratic than Bogart?” he demanded.

  “It isn’t. But God knows what we were before we were Bogarts. And now brace yourself, Tarzan. My old man’s a dentist. And a dentist in Brooklyn, too! I guess the trustees like to use some of their scholarship pennies to give this joint a flavor of democracy. Not too much, of course. Just the right amount.”

  Chip did not think that his parents would take to Chessy, but hadn’t they sent him to Saint Luke’s to meet “different sorts of boys”? He decided to let Chessy join him on weekend bird walks, though the latter seemed to care very little for birds. He did care, however, about sex, and he talked of it with an openness that Chip found exciting. So long as he did not have to respond—and Chessy was perfectly willing to do all the talking—he thought it might be less wicked. Chessy was particularly vivid about the monastic aspects of school life.

  “What sense does it make to lock us up here, months at a time, with no woman under forty allowed to set foot on campus, except some guy’s sappy kid sister for Sunday lunch? I ask you, Tarzan, have you ever seen such a collection of bilious crones as our cleaning women? They say your grandfather inspects each candidate for the job. That old boy must have a depth of concupiscence to spot so precisely the attributes in a female that would make the most sex-starved boy vomit!”

  “I wish you’d leave my grandfather out of it,” Chip retorted. “And I wish you wouldn’t call me Tarzan.”

  “It’s only a pet name. And only in private. I like you, Benedict. You’re naïve, but you’re straight. Which not many guys in this snob academy are.”

  Chip was touched in spite of himself. “I like you, too, Chessy.”

  “Good. Maybe we’ll make something of it. What else do they offer us here?”

  “I don’t think I follow you.”

  “Oh, yes, you do, Tarzan. Yes, you do! You’ll be ready for a chimpanzee before the winter’s out. Hell, your grandfather can rumble on till the cows come home about ‘doing dirty things,’ but if he doesn’t let somebody out of this place from time to time, or let somebody in, he can take the consequences. He was young himself once. He ought to know.”

  Chip did not respond to this, and the following weekend he arranged to be too busy in the gym for their walk. Yet he was appalled to find his imagination aflame with the idea of “doing dirty things” with Chessy. At times the erotic images that filled his mind would be so vivid as to make concentration in the classroom impossible, and on one occasion he failed to respond to a master until the latter had thrice called his name.

  “Come, Benedict, daydreams, daydreams! The Christmas holidays with all your little girl friends will come around soon enough!”

  The class tittered, but Chessy’s smile was a leer.

  And then one night Chessy slipped into his cubicle and tried to get into his bed.

  “Get out of here!” Chip whispered fiercely and swung at him. Chessy dodged, snickered and returned to his own cubicle.

  After this Chip withdrew from all close association with his erstwhile friend. They greeted each other when they passed in the corridors, and they sometimes walked in company from the chapel to the schoolhouse, but Chip kept the conversations brief and impersonal and avoided any reference to the cubicle episode. Chessy, though, seemed to divine that such reticence must mark a major temptation. He would sneak up behind Chip and hiss in his ear: “You know you want it just as much as I do, Tarzan. Why hold out?”

  The riveting, humiliating idea that his weakness had been uncovered, that for all his outer fortitude it was apparent to Chessy that he yearned for another visit to his cubicle, that “Tarzan” was a fraud and a phony who feverishly pined to do everything Chessy wanted to do, ultimately exhausted him. Nothing at last seemed worth the tension in which he lived. The next time Chessy came to his cubicle, he allowed him to slip into his bed.

  ***

  The peculiar horror of the next weeks was that Chip could not seem to focus steadily for more than a few minutes at a time on what had happened, with the result that the shock of his guilt was a constantly repeated blow. He would be walking in the morning to chapel, or returning from the gymnasium against a reddening sky, or ascending the broad varnished stairway to the dormitory to don the stiff collar and tie required for supper, and he would feel a gasp of hope, as if, sinking in the ocean, he had just grasped the spar of safety, or, awakening from a nightmare, he had felt the blessed damp beads of relief on his brow, only to have the spar collapse, the illusion vanish, and know that he was doomed. The present was hopelessly spoiled, and also the future, even the years at Yale that his father had always assured him should be the happiest of his life.

  Chessy was astonished at the violence of his friend’s reaction. When Chip told him, the morning after the episode in the cubicle, that they must no longer be friends, he protested vigorously, running after Chip’s retreating figure and grabbing him by the arm.

  “Look, don’t be an ass. It didn’t mean anything. It’s just till we get home and can see girls. Isn’t it better than masturbating?”

  Chip looked at him in horror. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going to treat it as if it never happened. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it really didn’t!”

  “You mean we just dreamed it?”

  “Yes!”

  “You must be crazy!”

  “It would kill my parents. If you ever breathe a word of it, I’ll swear you’re a liar!”

  Chessy whistled. “Breathe a word of it? Do you think I’m proud of it?”

  “It was your idea.”

  “And I had a ready pupil! Boy, how ready!”

  Chip left him without another word. Chessy was like one of those little devils in the choir screen at Albi whose job it was to prod the damned with pitchforks. It was not his fault; it was his function. Chessy at length accepted the situation with a shrug and found his way to more hospitable cubicles.

  Chip now had no close friends, but he found some relief in his semi-isolation. Without intimates he had no spies; without spies he could, in his own way, relax and learn to live with the grim but silent companion of a guilt that he knew now would never leave him.

  Listening to his grandfather’s sermons, watching the sunlight through clouds making first jewels and then dark blobs of the scarlet and green robes and turbans in the great west window, he would find himself lulled into a kind of torpor by the mellifluous phrases.

  “There are those today, boys, who will tell you that a man is not truly the master of his being. The thief, they will maintain, cannot help reaching his hand into another’s pocket; the adulterer is the prey of his own lust; even the murderer is propelled helplessly towards his victim by a rage that overpowers him. Our leaning to sin is a compulsion, like alcoholism or drug addiction. But always remember this, boys. Those who argue thus seek to deprive you of your own free will, of your very soul! For without sin, how can there be virtue? Without the struggle, where is the reward? Any man can do anything that he wills to do. What is an alcoholic but one who has chosen to destroy his will? But if he has destroyed it, must he not once have had it to destroy?”

  Towards the end of March a sluggish spring brought mud puddles to the campus, and a white sky made the bare branches of the elms seem like bones. The winter had been so long and cold that it seemed too late for leaves. The boys were bored, the masters irritable, the wait for spring had become interminable. And then the one thing that everybody hungered for occurred: a scandal.

  It had long been recognized by the more experienced members of the faculty, and even imparted to some of the sixth-formers who acted as monitors with semidiscip
linary powers over their juniors, that Mr. B had to be insulated from certain campus misdemeanors of which he took too somber a view. Mr. B was a saint, it was conceded, but saints were sometimes impracticable. Taking the name of the Lord in vain, for example, and smoking were practices so common in many of the families from which the boys came that expulsion on their account, or even suspension, might have made the school ridiculous to the New England academic world. Accordingly, it was tacitly understood by the disciplinarians at Saint Luke’s that swearing or smoking would be punished without being reported to the headmaster. Any boy, it was felt, who uttered an oath in Mr. B’s hearing, or took a puff in his presence, was too great a fool to be protected. And to some extent sexual offenses fell into this category. A master or monitor might learn to look the other way if he suspected activities that amounted only to masturbation. Sodomy and oral sex, however, were different matters. Yet there was no such uniformity among the faculty in this area as in that of swearing and smoking, and if a young idealistic master happened to bump into even the mildest form of Mr. B’s “dirty things,” the fat might be in the fire.

  Unhappily for Chessy Bogart, just such a master was on duty in his dormitory when a boy was reported sick during the night. Hurrying to the cubicle of the afflicted student, young Mr. Boyd, a devout teacher of sacred studies, ill-guided by his pocket flashlight, entered the wrong cubicle and discovered Chessy in bed with another boy. It was only too evident even to his chaste vision what they were doing, and the next morning every boy at Saint Luke’s knew that the two culprits had been summoned to Mr. B’s office.

  Chip, who as a fifth-former had his own study, went there during an hour’s break between classes to avoid the gossip. He knew that at least a dozen other boys had been involved in the same activity in that dormitory, and he wanted to avoid the feverish speculation as to whether other “arrests” were likely to follow. He felt a sudden calmness and clearheadedness. Now that all the world was mad, it was perhaps time to be sane. He had a curious sense that the worst was behind him, that he had, to some extent anyway, been through his purgatory. He even suspected that there might be offered to him an unusual way to redeem himself. When the inevitable knock came to his door, he was ready for it. He even had a moment to reflect that his pulse was actually normal.

  “Charles, are you there? May I come in?”

  “Come in, sir.”

  Never before at school, except in his grandfather’s own office, had he been addressed by the headmaster as “Charles.” The door opened, and the little man, very grave but somehow not formidable, came in.

  “Let me sit here by your desk, Charles.” The voice was kinder than Chip had ever heard it. The deep, deep eyes were fixed on him. “I suppose you have heard what has happened. Two boys in your dormitory were caught by Mr. Boyd doing things with each other that no decent boy would do. I have no wish to be more specific. The boys will be expelled. That is not why I am here. I am here because one of them, Bogart, told me he had done nothing that others had not done. Oh, he was very bold about it! He declared that if I were logical, I should expel half the school. He even went so far, Charles, as to imply that he had done these things with you. Is that true? Have I been living in a fool’s paradise?”

  Chip felt almost lightheaded in the rush of his sudden assurance. “It is not true, sir.”

  There was not even a flicker of relief in that steadfast gaze. “I didn’t believe him for a minute. It was obvious that the wretched boy thought that I would never expel my grandson and therefore would, morally, not be able to expel him. He was wrong, of course. I would have expelled a grandson who had done what he had done. But that need not detain us further. I want you to go to my house, Charles, and remain there until the two boys have left the campus.”

  “May I ask why, sir?”

  “Because I am afraid you might be tempted to beat up Bogart. I can understand how a clean young man would react to so base an accusation.”

  Chip rose with his grandfather and walked with him to the shingle house behind the chapel that was the headmaster’s home. And that was all.

  There were no repercussions. It became known that Chessy had tried to implicate Chip, but his motive was obvious, and no one saw any reason to disbelieve the denial. Chip seemed to have been cleared by the very gods themselves.

  There were times when he wondered whether a drama so inner had any reality. Each week that passed made his nocturnal experience with Chessy seem less true. And as for his lie, what good would the truth have done his partner in evil? He had saved the peace of mind of his parents and possibly the very life of Mr. B. For he had felt at last the full weight of the old man’s love.

  There was a distinct change thereafter in the way Mr. B treated him. He never called him “Benedict” now, even in class, but always “Charles.” It was as if Chip had passed through his period of probation, triumphantly, and could be recognized before the world as the staff on which the aging headmaster would confidently lean. Teachers and boys both seemed to sense this, and as Chip, gaining confidence, and even a kind of happiness, took in the new friendliness of the campus, he became popular. When at the end of the spring term he was elected head monitor for his second and final year, the gratified headmaster wrote his daughter that he could now sing his Nunc Dimittis.

  But, for all his pride in his only grandson, Mr. B’s health failed rapidly during Chip’s final year at school. It was felt by the senior masters that the tall, blond youth who presided so serenely at assembly, who read the lesson in chapel with such admirable clarity and seriousness, who administered justice to the younger boys with such humanity and understanding, was a kind of gray eminence to the declining chief. It was to Chip that they came before presenting some delicate problem to Mr. B—the need to relax an outdated rule, the question of a new privilege sought by the boys and already granted by other schools—and Chip would explain the matter tactfully to his grandfather, who seemed quite willing now to relax his clung-to prejudices in favor of this new enlightenment.

  The announcement of Mr. B’s retirement was scheduled to be made at Chip’s graduation, which would almost have made it an occasion of too much sentiment. At any rate it was not to be, for the old man had a stroke a month before Prize Day and lingered only a week, immobile and hardly able to articulate a word. As the end approached, Matilda Benedict relinquished the post by her father’s bedside that she had occupied for three days and most of three nights and indicated to Chip that he should hold his grandfather in his arms for the last minutes.

  Mr. B tried to touch Chip’s head, perhaps to bless him, and then expired, whispering a name that was presumably his.

  Afterwards, Chip’s mother followed him into the next room, where she found him sobbing brokenly.

  “But, my darling boy, you must try to remember that you made him happy!” she cried, almost in surprise at such violent emotion. “Happy as nobody else ever made him. Even my own mother!”

  “And yet I did something for which he would have expelled me, had he known.”

  Neither Matilda nor her husband was ever able to extract from their son another syllable as to what this act had been. They concluded that it must have been a prank that his natural grief for the old man had blown out of all proportion.

  7. CHIP

  CHIP AT YALE began to believe that it might be possible to become the master of his own destiny. In the larger view of life that emancipation from boarding school opened to him, he was able at last to fit his parents into his background in such a way as not wholly to obliterate it. He even thought that he was learning to understand them, and with this prospect there came a kind of compassion. After all, they certainly meant well, at least according to their own lights, and if they were unable to see the beauty in all the pleasures of life, the beauty in what they called sin, it might be sage to remember that they, too, had had parents.

  The great thing for him to accept, as he now saw it, was himself. His heart, his mind, his body, composed the donnee of h
is life. If these should not be adequate for the role of Charles Benedict as Elihu and Matilda conceived it, then that might simply be too bad. If people found him attractive, if people wanted to fuss over him, where was the harm? They were probably making a mistake, but that was their lookout. “Chip loves Chip; that is, ‘I am I,’ ” he paraphrased Richard III. Was he good? Was he bad? He had first to find out what he was. Free will, if it existed at all, would have to wait.

  He declined to confine himself to his classmates at Saint Luke’s and those of its long-time athletic rival, Chelton; these were too cliquish for his taste; and he found the men from Hotchkiss, Andover and Choate more interested in the college as a whole than in the common denominator of their own social backgrounds. It was perfectly true, as he pointed out to his roommate, Lars Alversen, that their group was entirely prep school, but so long as it included the men who ran the News, the Political Union and the fraternities, might it not be an adequate cross section? Would it not be artificial to go about canvassing men from high schools or on scholarships? Or would it? Chip was not sure. He still worried about being a snob.

  Lars cited the man across the hall who, in his determination to know every member of their class, had posted a list on his wall and checked off each name as he met its owner. Lars, leery of anything in excess, dubbed him an egregious ass.

  “But don’t those people get results?” Chip asked earnestly. “Can you really accomplish anything in life if you’re not willing to make a bit of an ass of yourself?”

  Yale, at any rate, kept filling his life with pleasant things. He was on the News’, he sang with the Wiffenpoofs; he rode on the Berkeley crew; he joined Zeta Xi; and his grades promised him Phi Beta Kappa. He was majoring in English, which everybody seemed to agree was the best preparation for law, and he enjoyed Chauncey Tinker’s emotional disquisitions on the British Romantic poets and Johnny Berdan’s more trenchant analysis of Pope. His friends confidently predicted that in the spring of junior year he would be tapped for Bulldog, the most coveted of the senior societies.