Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “So you liked my friend,” he said as we started down to the pier.

  “He seems very sure of himself.”

  “He has a lot to be sure of.”

  “As much as all that?”

  “Well, he has all the things I want, anyway. The obvious things. It’s why people hate him.”

  “Do they hate him?”

  “They envy him. It’s the same thing.”

  “Then you must hate him, too.”

  “Ah, but you see I’m different. He and I are part of each other. You might put it that we’ve made a kind of blood compact.”

  “Just you and he?”

  “And the devil. Isn’t he always the third?”

  “You mean you’ve sold your souls?”

  “Dear no. He didn’t have to buy us. We were born his. Chip even aspires to be his first lieutenant.”

  “To lead the armies of Satan against the citadel of God?”

  “And don’t kid yourself. We may yet prevail.”

  It seemed to me that we were getting pretty silly, even for Bar Harbor. “What’s so great about being wicked?”

  “Wicked is a term of abuse used by Jehovah. The damned are no more wicked than the saved are good.”

  “Meaning that yours is really a noble rebellion?”

  “Against the tyranny of whatever is.”

  “You speak of your friend as if he were your commanding officer. I always thought of you as independent, Chessy. Whatever happened to that Argentinian uncle?”

  “He went bankrupt and blew his brains out.”

  I glanced to see if he was kidding. “And left you nothing?”

  Chessy formed a naught with his forefinger and thumb. “I depend entirely now upon my generous friend.”

  “Then you really have sold your soul?”

  “Oh, I think he’ll get his money’s worth.”

  Before us now was Chip’s gleaming white boat. Its master, dressed like his friend, was busy with the sails. He paused only briefly to wave at me. Chessy leaned over to place his brown bag on the deck and then handed me into the boat.

  “Have a nice sail, you two.”

  “Aren’t you coming?” I asked in astonishment.

  “And make a crowd? I know better.” And he walked down the pier, whistling, without once turning back.

  Chip did not ask me to help him with the sails. He was too competent even to pretend that he could be assisted. He offered me a newspaper and a beer, both of which I declined. I simply sat on the fantail and watched him. It was amazing. He was even better-looking than I remembered. And his ignoring my presence helped to keep alive my heady sense of unreality.

  At last we got under way. I took the tiller as he pulled up the sails. We did not exchange a word until we were clear of the harbor. Once we were settled on a course along the shoreline, with a mild breeze behind us, he slipped into the seat beside me and relieved me of my task.

  “What do you want? You know I’m engaged.”

  “Do you like Browning? ‘Your leave for one more last ride with me.’ ”

  “You mean you’re going to take me for a ride?”

  “You accept?”

  “What else can I do now? Swim ashore?”

  He laughed and quoted mockingly:

  “‘The blood replenished me again;

  My last thought was at least not vain:

  I and my mistress, side by side,

  Shall be together, breathe and ride,

  So, one day more am I deified.

  Who knows but the world may end tonight?’”

  “Except that I’m not your mistress.”

  “Neither was the lady in the poem. In that sense of the word. I only wanted to get you away for a bit. Out here on the ocean there’s just us.”

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “Nothing. Except look at you.”

  “Well, I guess that’s safe enough. A cat can look at an engaged girl.”

  “You keep coming back to your engagement.”

  “Isn’t it natural?”

  “Not if you don’t believe in it. And you don’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? You wouldn’t have come out with me if you did.”

  “I didn’t mean to come out with you. I meant to come out with Chessy.”

  “You only came because you knew I’d be here.”

  “You have a nerve!”

  “Don’t be vulgar, Alida. It doesn’t become you.”

  I found that I was willing to accept this, shaming as it was. “Very well. I did come because I wanted to see you. But I don’t understand where it is going to get either of us. I have no idea of giving up Jonathan. And I certainly have no idea of having an affair with you before I marry him. That would be vulgar.”

  “Agreed. But you say you have no idea of giving up Askew. Is there really anything to give up? Isn’t he just a fantasy?”

  “Of yours or mine?”

  “Of both. Insofar as we let him stand between us.”

  As at the dance, I felt his extraordinary effect on me. It was not simply sex appeal—unless that was what it simply was. No, it was more the intriguing sense of having no further decisions to make, of being folded up and packed into what I somehow imagined as the smart snakeskin traveling case of this grave and beautiful young man.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Tell me about yourself.”

  “There’s not much to tell. Except that my life began last spring. When I decided, belatedly, that I was going to live. I mean live my own life, not anyone else’s.”

  “And what made you come to this great decision?”

  “I looked at my parents and suddenly saw them. That was all.”

  “I gather you didn’t much like what you saw.” I sighed in sympathy. “I saw mine at a somewhat earlier date.”

  “What I really saw was that there was no point trying to oblige them.”

  “Because you never could?”

  “Exactly. Because I never could.”

  “Is that what Chessy means when he says you’re damned?”

  “How like Chessy to put it that way.” But he did not answer the question.

  “And what about me?” I went on. “Is there any point trying to oblige me?”

  “I only want you to oblige yourself. We know we’re attracted. I see no obstacle. I certainly don’t consider Askew one.”

  “Even though he’s my fiance?”

  “You don’t care for him! You couldn’t. He doesn’t even exist where it’s a question of you and me.”

  “I think I want to go back now.” He did not reply and made no move to change course. After a few minutes of silence I asked sharply, “What are you going to do? Drown me?” When he still failed to respond, or even look at me, I said in a different tone, the sudden gravity of which surprised me, “All right. Go ahead!”

  “Coming about,” he said gruffly, and we turned our bow back to Bar Harbor.

  At the pier, when he had taken down the sails as I watched—expertly and speedily, of course—he said: “Chessy and I will be leaving tomorrow for Dark Harbor. After that I go back to Yale. I’ll call you in New York in September. If you’ll agree to have dinner with me, I’ll take you to a place where no one will know you.”

  And that was all. Feeling at once very flat and oddly exhilarated, I drove home alone. I found Jonathan on the porch, waiting for me. He asked sulkily where I had been.

  “I’ve been for a sail.”

  “With that callow blond fellow you were dancing with last night?”

  “The same.”

  “Alida, how could you?”

  His tone was high and shrill. He ranted on about my obligations to him. Ultimately he burst into tears. I watched him coldly. He seemed a part of my life, even an undetachable part, but he was in the past—like Mummie and Daddy. He was me. He was awful.

  “You needn’t worry, Jonathan,” I said wearily. “Nothing is going to happen between me and t
hat young man.”

  “And how, pray, can I be sure of that?”

  “Because he’s damned.”

  “He certainly will be if he doesn’t let you alone!”

  “I don’t think I want to discuss him with you. If you insist, I shall have to break our engagement.”

  “Alida, please!” And he went down on his knees just as Mummie appeared in the doorway. It was a thoroughly ridiculous scene.

  9. ALIDA

  CHIP WAS GOOD to his word; I did not hear again from him or from Chessy during the short balance of the Bar Harbor season, or even for two weeks after our return to town. I began to wonder whether the whole episode, dreamlike from its beginning, might not have been indeed a dream. And yet, for some deep and probably neurotic reason, I did not suffer from as much emotional turmoil as I anticipated. I was aware of an unringing telephone and a fruitless mail delivery, yet I was not constantly hovering by the machine or rushing down to the front hall at the postman’s ring. The contrast between my new friend and my betrothed was so vivid that they could not, it seemed to me, very well exist in the same world, let alone in the same restless female heart. I had created in myself a dichotomy between the reality of my proposed marriage and the reality of Chip Benedict.

  Lady Lennox had returned to England, and Jonathan had opened up his father’s old town house on East Eighty-ninth Street, a gloomy French Renaissance mansion, full of dusty bad paintings and nicked gilded furniture, in which he dwelled sulkily with an old family butler, very deaf, and two crones of maids. He had still not recovered from his jealous fit in Maine, but as I refused to discuss it, he had no alternative but to follow my bright, artificial conversational leads into other subjects, any other subjects. We went out together two or three times a week and went over the details of the large spring wedding that my parents had agreed to give us—entirely at Jonathan’s expense, as I later found out.

  It may sound heartless that I should have gone into such detail with him over a wedding the reality of which I no longer believed in. All I can say in my defense is that I seemed to be living increasingly in illusions and was terrified of what might happen if I emerged from them.

  Chip broke his silence in late September with a letter suggesting that I meet him at a restaurant in the upper West Side. He did not ask me to respond; he simply wrote that he would be there on a particular night. And so, of course, was I. It was certainly not a place where anyone would have expected to see the fiancee of Jonathan Askew. It was dark and leathery and had large reproductions of Remington paintings of cowboys and Indians. The booths were private and the food good. Only much later did I discover why Chip was so familiar with the area.

  We were soon meeting weekly. Chip seemed to have no difficulty leaving New Haven. He did not even mind missing a meeting of his senior society, which I did not then understand was a serious matter. We would talk with great animation and congeniality about the obtuseness of our families and the ineptitude of our friends. I was fascinated by his picture of the family rule at Benedict, and he, for some reason, by mine of my crazy home. We never mentioned Jonathan or my engagement. After dinner and many brandies he would take a taxi to Grand Central, dropping me home on the way. In the taxi we would neck violently. He handled me in a way that left me sleepless, frustrated and aching with desire for the rest of the night. Little did I then know that his own nocturnal hours were bothered by no such restlessness. The taxi would take him on, actually not to Grand Central, but to a lush private brothel that this blue-eyed angel had been frequenting for years.

  I have said we both talked a lot at dinner, and we did, but Chip talked the most. He was very serious about both of us, but he was particularly serious about himself. He was a great admirer of Thorstein Veblen, and what he most deplored in his family was their efforts to negate in their own lives the principle of “conspicuous consumption.”

  “It’s perfectly possible for a man to free himself of material concerns,” Chip argued. “I don’t deny such saints as Francis of Assisi. But what I abominate is people who live for the world and yet make a religion of denying it. My parents’ whole life is dedicated to the making and preservation of wealth. Yet in their false simplicity, their splendid isolation up there in Connecticut, they would have you think they’re as pure as the early desert fathers!”

  “What about your grandfather? The headmaster, I mean, not the tycoon. Didn’t you consider him a saint?”

  “And perhaps he was, poor dear man. He may have dimly suspected that his school was only a front for the most rabid form of economic laissez-faire, but what could he do about it? Basically, he was a canary warbling in a gilded cage. Oh, yes, the Benedicts like canaries.”

  “But surely you don’t imagine that my family are any less worldly? Even though they don’t have much to be worldly about.” I coughed at the very idea. “To put it mildly!”

  “But that’s just the point. There’s no nauseous hypocrisy about them. They’re straight out of Veblen. Bar Harbor could be a footnote to illustrate his thesis. Your ma under the umbrella table at the Swimming Club corresponds to an Indian squaw decked out in beads to show the prowess of her chief.”

  I tried to imagine Daddy with a feathered headdress doing a war dance. “Is it so great a thing to be frank about being worldly?” I asked dubiously. “Suppose one is really poor? Isn’t it rather a fraud?”

  I doubt that he got the point. “So long as people are what they seem, I can deal with them,” he emphasized. “With you, for example, I know that I’m living in the real world. You made no bones about trying to be the most famous debutante in order to catch the richest stag.”

  “Merci du compliment^

  “Seriously, it puts you way ahead of the Benedicts and all their gang. Because if you can deal with the world as it is, you can handle truth, and if you can handle truth, you’re free!”

  I stared into those shining blue eyes and marveled at what he believed. For a minute I debated the pros and cons of seeing whether he could handle the truth. Should I try to persuade him that his parents were a dozen times superior to my poor shabby progenitors? For I perfectly understood that he was making an Alp out of the molehill of Mr. and Mrs. Benedict’s merely human fatuity. They were probably an admirable couple, suffering only from the common need to dress up their underlying motivations. But what was there and then to change my life was that I suddenly saw—in a flash of mental illumina tion—that to point this out would be to dish myself forever with this fanatic. Truth had been fascinating to Jonathan; with Chip it would have cost me all my glamour. And I wanted Chip—oh, yes, I wanted him as a desert monk wanted salvation!

  “Are you richer than Jonathan?” I asked boldly.

  “Very likely.”

  That was the night, when I came home, that I found Jonathan waiting up with my parents. He had finally put a detective on me and knew all about my dinners with Chip. There was a very noisy scene, which I witnessed as coolly as if I had been at a play. Mummie screamed at me as violently as Jonathan, and even Daddy made throaty noises of protest. I did not know at the time how deeply they were both financially in Jonathan’s debt. At last I went up to my bedroom and locked the door. The last words I heard were Daddy’s as he tried to persuade Jonathan to go home, promising him that he would talk me around in the “cold, clear light” of morning.

  When I came down to breakfast in that cold, clear light after a heavy sleep induced by three Seconals, I found Deborah in the dining room. Mummie was still in her room, and Daddy had gone to his club, as one might, in despair, go to church.

  “I think you’re behaving very badly,” Deborah said, and I knew at once that her averted eyes and controlled tone masked the deepest resentment.

  I have not written much about my younger sister. I am afraid she has never really interested me. She was always just making it; that is, her grades at school were just respectable, her looks, bland and suggestive of future puffiness (alas, now confirmed) were just short of pretty, and her temper just m
issed being amiable. If Deborah (to use a current term) had been a jogger, she would have been one of those wide-bottomed wad-dlers you see panting slowly and painfully around the reservoir in Central Park. Everything came hard to her, but she tried to make up for this in the smugness of her assurance that in any race with her older sister the tortoise was bound to come out ahead. She may yet.

  “If engagements can’t be broken,” I retorted to her implication, “what on earth is the point of them?”

  “The point is to find out if two people really love each other. But that wasn’t the point of your engagement. You never had any idea of loving Jonathan. You’ve just found somebody richer, that’s all.”

  “That’s not true!” I cried, stung.

  “That he’s not richer?”

  “No, that I’m being mercenary. I didn’t love Jonathan, and I do love Chip. Do you still think I ought to marry Jonathan?”

  “Yes! Because you led him on. You owe it to him. You made a bargain in cold blood. Now you’re welching. I think it’s vile!”

  “Deborah! Your tone!”

  “I mean it, Alida. All your life things have come easily to you, so you sneer at them. You sneer at all the things I haven’t had. And now you sneer at Jonathan and kick him over because something prettier has caught your fancy. What do you care if he’s broken-hearted? What do you care about the scandal and what it may do to my chances of ever getting married?”

  “Scandal? What scandal? Why should it be a scandal for a girl to break her engagement?”

  “Because Jonathan wants money back from Daddy he can’t repay! You should have heard what went on after you went to bed. They woke me up with their shouting. Oh, why do I waste my breath? What do you care?” And Deborah, bursting into angry tears, rushed from the room.

  When I had swallowed two cups of black coffee, I took a taxi to the Metropolitan Club and sent my name up to Gus Leighton. He met me in the visitors’ lounge, which at that early hour was empty. Typically, he showed no reaction as I related what had happened; he simply waited, expressionless, until I had finished.