Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “Darling, let me get you a drink before we discuss it.”

  “I have no need of one. You know how I feel about drinking before six.”

  “But this is a crisis.”

  “I don’t know that it’s a crisis. It’s a tragedy. For Chessy, anyway. And, to a lesser extent, for me. Because our friendship will hardly survive it. It’s certainly not a crisis in the sense that there’s anything to do about it. It’s done.”

  “You mean the note’s withdrawn.”

  “Well, that of course. I was referring to my ultimatum to Chessy.”

  “Surely you won’t stick to it!”

  “What are you talking about, Alida? Of course I’ll stick to it.”

  “You mean you’ll deliberately ruin Chessy’s law career? Maybe his whole life as well?”

  Oh, how tightly Chip set his lips! He was silent for a few minutes while he controlled his impatience. When he spoke, his tone was clipped, almost condescending. “You are being dramatic. Chessy’s career will not be ruined unless he chooses to go before the Honor Court. If he does that and is convicted—as I have little doubt he would be—he will be expelled from the university without credit. If on the other hand he resigns, on any grounds he chooses—health, lack of funds, ailing parents—he will be able to transfer to another law school. The Wall Street firm that has already offered him a job will probably not be too concerned. Actually, I am doing him a great favor. For I’m not at all sure that my failing to report him isn’t in itself a violation of the honor code.”

  “But, darling, how can you be so sure that he copied that note? Couldn’t the resemblance be a coincidence? Chessy swears it was!”

  “You can judge for yourself. I’ve got both notes in my briefcase.”

  “But what do I know about collective bargaining?”

  “You don’t have to know anything about it. The similarities are obvious. A child could see that Chessy was a plagiarist. And I don’t think any more of him for coming weeping to you and lying in his teeth.”

  In his now handsome indignation, so much more appealing than his cold contempt, he might have been Sir Galahad. I shook my head to dispel a reluctant admiration.

  “But this is you and Chessy, Chip!” I cried, as the full grotesqueness of the situation suddenly struck me. “You and Chessy and a cribbed note, if you like. It’s been taken out of the Review. There’s nothing left of it! Chessy isn’t going to do anything like that again. He only did it, anyway, because you put so much heat on him. Can’t you forgive him?”

  “It’s not a question of forgiveness. We took the pledge to observe the honor code when we came down here. One of the principal duties is to report a violation. And there is no question in my mind that Chessy violated the code when he submitted a paper that was not his.”

  “But you caught it in time, darling!”

  “Fortunately for Chessy, yes. If it had already been published, I should have had no alternative but to report him.”

  “Isn’t that what we used to call snitching?”

  Chip did not flinch. “That’s what we should have called it at Saint Luke’s or Yale. But in Virginia they think differently about these matters. The university is full of stories of men turning in their closest friends. I didn’t have to come down here, but having come, I certainly intend to abide by their rules.”

  I stamped my foot. “I can’t see it! Here we are, you and I and Chessy. In a few more months we’ll be out of this place. How can you let some crazy code designed by ancient slaveholders control what we three do in a matter known only to us?”

  “That is your way of looking at it. I’ve told you mine.”

  “But doesn’t it kill you, Chip?”

  “Kill me?”

  “To hurt Chessy this way? Your dearest friend? Who introduced us?”

  Chip could quote Shakespeare at the damndest times! He actually smiled now. “‘What? Michael Cassio, that came a-wooing with you?’ ”

  I saw then that it was hopeless. “You’ll be smothering me next,” I muttered. “Like Desdemona.”

  I don’t know what I might not have done had he not stepped forward just then to take me in his arms. “I know this is hard on you, dearest. And after all, you didn’t take the oath. But I did, and you must try to let me live with my conscience.”

  I hugged him, sobbing. “But it’s such a monster for me to share you with!”

  I said no more, because I was a coward. If Chessy threatened to stand between me and my love, I was going to throw Chessy, innocent or guilty, to the dogs. That was simply the way things were. I am afraid that Chip’s very ruthlessness, his hard bright honor, as shining as his blue eyes and pale skin, had a strong sexual attraction for me. In life, as in fantasy, I wanted to be held tightly, dominated, suffocated. Yes, like Desdemona!

  I did not see Chessy before he left school. He explained to people that he had to move back to Brooklyn to be closer to his mother, who had had a stroke. He transferred without difficulty to New York University Law School. I believe that Mr. Benedict, who was a trustee of that university, provided some assistance at Chip’s request. I doubt that Chessy told the true story to anyone, including his wife, though I suppose he must have squared his mother in some fashion to make her feign a temporary ailment. But from what little I knew of Mrs. Bogart, she was putty in her clever son’s hands. Certainly Chip never told anyone, so the secret is revealed for the first time on this page.

  No, that is not true. I have just remembered that I did tell somebody: my motherin-law. When Chip graduated, she and Mr. Benedict came down to Charlottesville for several days, and she and I took a couple of long walks in the spring countryside. On one of these I told her the story of Chessy and confessed my doubts as to the rectitude of what Chip had done. Mrs. Benedict stopped short and looked at me in surprise.

  “But, Alida, what else could he possibly have done? I think he behaved admirably! And with the greatest kindness and consideration, too. I suppose you will not want me to speak to him about it, but otherwise I should offer him my heartiest congratulations!”

  “Well, please don’t” was all I could murmur. These Benedicts!

  11. CHIP

  AFTER CHIP married Alida, and before he went down to Charlottesville, he visited the Bank of Commerce on Wall Street to determine exactly what family property had been put in his name and under what conditions. The officer who received him, though polite, was reluctant to impart the whole truth, but under persistent questioning he had no choice but to do so. Chip was not only the absolute owner of a considerable number of securities; he was entitled to the income of a sizable trust fund. These properties had been handled by his father under a power of attorney signed by Chip on his twenty-first birthday. This he now promptly revoked, directing that the income henceforth be remitted to him directly and sending formal notice to his father that he would no longer be responsible for any poor relatives. He would not be rich, he concluded, by Benedict standards, but when he moved to Charlottesville, he would probably be one of the richest students at Virginia Law.

  His father invited him to lunch at the Yale Club the very next day. Chip could hardly decline.

  “Of course I’ll take over the cousins,” Elihu told him with his usual cryptic smile. “But are you sure, my boy, that you’re acting in your own best interests? I thought you and I had agreed that I should handle any money settled on you for tax reasons while you were busy being educated.”

  “I’ve changed my mind. That is, if I ever really made it up. From now on, I’ll be my own boss.”

  “You don’t consider that you may hold money that your mother and I gave you in a kind of moral trust?”

  “I don’t see how a money trust can be moral. But of course I understand what you’re driving at. You’d be entirely justified in disinheriting me. Go ahead.”

  Elihu, as usual, betrayed no indignation. He simply raised his eyebrows as if he had just received an interesting proposition. “I know that some young people today despise wh
at they consider the ill-gotten gains of their progenitors. But I never heard of an idealist who chose to live off those gains while he reviled the generation that earned them.”

  “I’m not reviling anybody, Dad. Nor am I in the least a radical or revolutionary. I simply consider that the money you and Mother settled on me is a fair price for the moral domination you have chosen to exercise over me. I shall probably need every penny of it to pay for the operation of severing that umbilical cord!”

  Looking into his father’s widened eyes and at his now shriveling smile, he knew that the shaft had gone home. Was the dark pleasure, which was bound to turn into a pain as acute, if not more so, for himself, really worth it? And yet he could not help himself; he knew that he was doomed to strike and strike again.

  “I don’t care what you say, Chip. I refuse to cut you off. I shan’t give you that satisfaction. Now go on down to law school, do one hell of a job there and forget all about your mother and me!”

  As if Chip could! The family affection, the family expectations, seemed to permeate the atmosphere around the temporary oases of New Haven and Charlottesville like a coiling miasma. He had cut himself free for the moment, it was true; he was standing on his own two feet. He would have regarded as a sentimental weakness any refusal on his part to use money that had been legally settled on him. But the maintenance of that liberty was still going to be a long and arduous endeavor. It would have been easier had he been allowed to effect, at least during his law school years, a total breach with his parents, but how could he do that in the face of their refusal to take formal offense? He would have seemed shockingly brutal to his whole family, to his friends, to Alida. He had not even been able to prohibit his parents’ rare but regular visits. Alida, on whom he had counted for total cooperation, on whose dislike of his mother he had built his hope of alliance, had insisted on inviting them.

  He suspected that his attitude towards women might bear a relation to that of the ancient Greeks: that the satisfaction which they offered was largely physical. But Alida was obviously not going to be contented with any such limited role in his life. She seemed determined, on the contrary, to explore every aspect of his personality for the possible existence of hidden doors and rooms. The beautiful worldly debutante, who had happily resigned her tiara to be Mrs. Charles Benedict, was showing definite signs of using her leisure time—of which, it seemed, she had decidedly too much—to study her lord and master. Why could she not find a better occupation?

  For unlike his Greek predecessors, Chip was not opposed to careers for women, nor did he deem women intellectually inferior to men. He had the greatest respect for his mother’s intellectual capacities, and if he recognized that his father’s were greater, he did not think that sex was the reason for it. But he did believe, where mere companionship was concerned, that men had more to give men, and women, presumably, more to give women, than either sex had to give to the other. He would not have begrudged Alida a job; he did begrudge her a life hobby of himself.

  “Why don’t you write a novel?” he would ask her. “These sonnets are all very well, but I think it’s time you took on something more challenging.”

  It was a pity for her, he supposed, that he had a mind that could take in only one field at a time. At Yale he had been preoccupied with literature, Alida’s favorite subject, but now it was law, and there was no way that she could join him in the subtleties of interpreting the commerce clause or in the intricacies of corporate reorganizations. Besides, she wouldn’t have liked it even had she understood it. It wasn’t her kind of thing. She could never have shared his delight in legal categories or in the relief that his imagination found at the “reasonable” borderlines where legal thinking called a halt to speculation. She would not have admired, as he did, the practical solutions of the common law to the chaotic problems raised by human perversity. Alida’s enthusiasm and romanticism, indeed, had begun to seem messy to him.

  And yet if she would only stay, so to speak, on her side of the bed, how charming she could be! Chip did not believe in making love except when he was actually so engaged; in fact, he was disgusted by couples who were always exchanging amorous ogles. He had been most attracted to Alida when she had most resisted him; he wondered, wistfully at times, what had happened to the mocking girl who had been so rude to his parents on their first meeting.

  His restlessness at her aimlessness, however, turned into something more like disapproval when she at last seemed to have developed a purpose in life: that of bringing about a reconciliation with his parents. It was as if she had scented the renewal of “normalcy” that must inevitably follow his graduation, the return to the “real world” of Benedict that would end the golden fantasy of Charlottesville, and that she wanted to break in her husband to the life that there had never been any serious doubt (except in his own daydreams) that they were going eventually to lead. Was Alida any different, really, from his own mother in her fixed female adherence to the here and now, her refusal to accept any real nobility of concept as aught but a male fantasy? Oh, women could be revolutionaries, yes, and then they threw bombs, but short of that they took their chances, all too happily, with the status quo.

  But the worst thing that happened to him in Virginia was not of Alida’s making. It was of Chessy’s. That Chessy should have shown himself rotten to the core, putrid beyond any chance of redemption, had been a blow from which Chip did not immediately see how he was going to recover. For it had been Chessy with whom he had first allied himself, soul to soul, in the crisis that had shown him his parents for the shallow materialists they were. And if Chessy had to be cast into the outer darkness to which all along Elihu and Matilda Benedict had gladly consigned him, if Alida, the bright and beautiful, was converted to an obsequious daughter-in-law, if all the privileged youth of the Farmington Country Club brayed mockingly like donkeys at the very idea of Chip Benedict ever being anything that they had not taken entirely for granted (did he not subsist on Benedict dividends?), what had become of his resolution to be a free soul? Did he even have a clear idea of what he wanted to do with the shining sword of his new professional capacity?

  ***

  For all of these reasons the advent of war came as an actual relief to Chip. All decisions were now indefinitely or—who knew?—perhaps permanently postponed. Right after graduation he enrolled in midshipmen’s school on the USS Prairie State, docked in New York, and received his commission as an ensign just before Pearl Harbor.

  He was ordered immediately to sea and spent a year on an old destroyer escorting convoys in the Caribbean between Guantanamo and Colon. It was dull duty, punctured by a very occasional submarine attack, for the Germans were more occupied with the supply route to England than with stopping the shipment of cigarettes and magazines to the armed forces in the Canal Zone. To Chip, the long night watches and the never-changing tasks constituted a not altogether unpleasant vacuum, a kind of drugged routine, a suspension of life.

  He did not feel so much parted in space from Alida and their baby girl as in time. His wife and child seemed to belong to Charlottesville, to the Blue Ridge, to the golden haze into which his law school days had retreated. He did not really miss them, because in an odd way they had ceased to exist for him. When he thought of them, he thought of them with affection, and his letters to Alida were conscientious and detailed. But he did not think of them very much. And when, during his ship’s dry dock period in Colon, he moved into the apartment of a famous stripper, who filled the biggest cabaret in town nightly by a dance in which she simulated her own rape by a gorilla, her torso divided longitudinally between a hairy ape skin and shining nudity, he felt no remorse. The stripper corresponded to war as Alida did to peace.

  Alida wrote him long, lonely, nostalgic, uncharacteristic letters from Benedict, where she was living with his parents.

  “It seems so wrong that I should be sitting up here with every comfort while you toss about the ocean, a prey to hungry gray Nazi sharks. And yet I would gladly chan
ge with you, darling, for the mere bliss of knowing you were safe. Yet imagine you here, with the baby and me on the bridge of a destroyer! How you would loathe me if I were able, by a miracle, to effect such a transfer! War seems to bring out the elementary difference between the sexes. But is it not time that you applied for a little home leave? Might you not even be entitled to a spell of shore duty? Oh, dearest, please! Your mother refuses to join me in this plea, which I have just read aloud to her. She says that a man must make up his own mind in these matters. Didn’t you once compare her with Volumnia in Coriolanus? You were so right! And yet she and your father have been more loving to me than my parents ever dreamed of being. They are beyond praise.”

  Chip did not at all like this rather crawling submission to what he deemed the suffocating affections of Elihu and Matilda. And he certainly had no idea of applying for shore duty. Instead, when his destroyer was scheduled for decommissioning, and the officers were asked to submit their applications for new duty, he put his in for amphibious training.

  The skipper raised his eyebrows when he read it. “Here’s one application that’s sure to be granted. What the hell are you doing this for?”

  He was granted two weeks’ leave before reporting for duty at an amphibious training camp on the Chesapeake, and he elected to spend it in a suite in the St. Regis in New York. Alida joined him there, with the baby, but he dispatched the little girl and her nurse back to Benedict after only a day that they might not interfere with musicals and night clubs. Chip planned the maximum distraction to help him and Alida with the difficulty that so many couples found in wartime reunions, and he was relieved when it was time to go to Virginia. He hoped that he would be able to cope with this too adoring, rather sticky war wife when peace returned, but in the meantime he could not seem to be both a naval officer and a husband. He was able to do something for the poor girl, at any rate, for, as they soon found out, she was pregnant when he left.