Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  15. CHIP

  WHILE CHIP was in the process of establishing himself in Benedict, he had to come to grips with the proposition that the development of his personality there was going to be a lonely process. He had chosen a life and a site that were barren of the deepest kind of human companionship, at least as he conceived it. That this was partly due to aspects of his own character he entirely accepted. After all, Benedict was made up not only of his family and their business; it was also made up of Charles Benedict.

  The most important emotional result of his decision to settle in his home town had been the assimilation of Alida by her family-in-law. This had obviously been a needed step for her happiness, and he had even encouraged it, but it had nonetheless had the effect of uniting her with a group that, however loving, however admiring of their bright new leader, had still a watchful, and sometimes a faintly apprehensive eye fixed on his activities. Alida, together with his parents and sisters, constituted a kind of board of trustees who, if they quite properly left the management of affairs to their brilliant executive director, were still aware that they had placed all their eggs in a single basket, which this sometimes too innovative carrier might dangerously shake.

  Yes, they were all a bit afraid of him, or afraid for him, if there was a difference. When he and Alida had been alone together, there might have been a kind of sex appeal to her in the very enigma of his personality, and one that it was easy and even agreeable for him occasionally to exploit, but now that she was allied with his parents and siblings and approaching the plain of middle years, she was less allured by mystery and more alerted to fact. Alida had begun to show an interest in his business trips and in his hobbies, but it was a suspicious interest; she was inclined to resent rather than to respect the areas of his life in which she had little or no part. He had hoped, when she at last discovered that his parents did not—as she had once jealously suspected they did—own a part of him not available to herself, that she would be content with what she had, as all that a wife could reasonably expect. But it had not turned out that way. When Alida discovered that he was with his family very much what he was with her, it seemed only to indicate to her that she, rather than he, had all along been right; that she, not he, was the one in step. She would urge him now, for example, to spend more time with the children, or to go more often to see his mother, or to be more available to the officers of the company, or to dance more with the Benedict wives on Saturday nights at the country club. He would demur, usually with a laugh, but at times there was a dryness in his mirth.

  “When you married me you wanted Lancelot,” he told her, “and now you’ll settle for George Babbitt. I suppose that’s the story of the American wife.”

  “When you married me, you wanted Cleopatra,” she retorted, “and now you’ll settle for Dumb Dora. I suppose that’s the story of the American husband.”

  His parents were less articulate, but it was obvious that they were increasingly on Alida’s “side.” There was something in the way Matilda always brought Alida into any conversation and consulted her ahead of Chip that implied there was some neglect to be made up for. Hints were dropped, like: “Why don’t you take Alida to France this summer?” or: “Do you think Alida would enjoy a surprise party on her birthday?” But it was a small penalty, he supposed, to pay for the avoidance of the motherin-law-daughter-in-law rivalry that characterized so many of the company families. Peace was always at a price, and peace he most of the time had.

  His father was the person who gave him the greatest uneasiness. Since the stroke that had partly paralyzed him without affecting his mentality, Elihu had become somewhat withdrawn from affairs. He still, however, came every morning in his wheelchair to his office, which was directly below Chip’s, and spent a couple of hours reading company reports and looking out his window at the glassworks below. He kept abreast of all Chip’s plans and modifications, and he limited the articulation of his obvious disapproval to a minimum of comments.

  “We live in a different era,” he would repeat. “The fact that I don’t happen to like it doesn’t mean that I can’t adapt to it. The one thing I am determined never to be is the retired skipper haunting the bridge and whispering unsought navigational advice to his successor. You have the con, Chip. It’s up to you to steer the course.”

  Chip got on well enough with the other officers of the com pany, but he had no intimates among them. They were, by and large, able and pleasant men, dedicated to their work, but on the whole he found them dull, and he abominated their endless discussion of sports and politics. He also declined to discuss sex with the few who enjoyed that subject—the majority were inhibited by the fear that one man might tell his wife, who would tell theirs—because he felt that the subject was of deeper concern to him than to them. For he had resumed his old habit of visits to private brothels on trips to New York. The place that he had frequented in his Yale days was long gone, but there were plenty of others, and he was willing to pay the highest price. He could not abide an atmosphere of leers and dirty jokes. The sexual act with a beautiful partner was to him a most serious business and had to be conducted, with all its preliminaries and aftermaths, in a comfortable, even luxurious privacy. When he found the right partner, he would go back to her for months at a time, but his heart was never involved; that was not so much a rule as a condition to ecstasy. When Chip read in books that purchased love was a drab and hollow affair, he would simply reflect that the author did not know how to buy.

  He was, in fact, a constant reader. He sought in books the knowledge, almost the companionship, that he did not find in the people of Benedict. He rarely discussed his reading with others, for he wished to avoid the fatuous picture of the ambitious corporate executive seeking culture in selected readings from the Harvard Classics. He did not even much relish bookish talk with Alida, because he suspected that literature to her, despite her own pretensions to be a writer, was more of a decoration to life than an inner necessity. Poetry, fiction and, to a lesser extent, painting had begun to play a role for him not unlike that of the girls he met in New York. It was beauty—the beauty he did not find in Benedict.

  When he read Madame Bovary, he would piece together every parallel to Alida’s life in their factory town, as at Yale he had traced his own mother in Hamlet’s or Coriolanus’. When he read The Ambassadors, he saw Matilda in Mrs. Newsome and himself in Chad. When he read Moby-Dick, his favorite of all novels, he saw his late grandfather, Mr. B, as Ahab in a lifelong and ultimately suicidal pursuit of the devil. The white whale! Had any poet more splendidly conceived the intrinsic evil of the universe?

  On trips to Manhattan, more frequent than his business required, he was a constant visitor at the Whitney and Modern Art Museums. He would not read books on art, any more than he would read criticism of literature; appreciation to him was entirely a matter between the artifact and the beholder. He would stand before a painting in motionless contemplation for ten minutes at a stretch, picking times when he would encounter the minimum of other observers. So disgusted would he become at the least hint of “gushing” or “expertise” that he would leave the gallery or, at a party, abruptly change the conversation. It was not surprising that he gained the reputation of being rather a Philistine among the ladies of Benedict who went to New York every two weeks for courses in art appreciation and raised money for the Metropolitan Opera.

  One friend with whom he still enjoyed some intimacy was Lars, whom he always saw on a New York visit and who frequently came to Benedict, but there was always in Lars, beneath his smiling, tolerant benignity, beneath the faint shrug that implied that he accepted the possibility of a purposeless universe, a side of his nature that seemed to endorse the attitude “But so long as we know nothing, why not conform to a norm that at least pays the rent and the butcher?” Karen, his wife, was different. She was a Boston girl, of Boston’s best, a Hooper, blue-eyed, bright, tall and strong, with a skin of shining, unblemished alabaster and ideals that would yield to nothing. She w
as also very intelligent, and Chip had found that he could talk to her as to nobody else. It didn’t even matter that she would repeat what he said to her husband.

  On one of his Manhattan trips, when he had been persuaded to fill in as an extra man at a dinner party the Alversens were giving, he had an unusual conversation with Karen. He had been bored at dinner between the wives of two lawyers who seemed interested only in schools and offspring, and he sought his hostess as soon as Lars allowed the gentlemen to leave their brandy and cigars.

  The living room was very Boston, at least as Chip imagined it, long and narrow with rather uncomfortable Colonial chairs and settees, their backs to the wall, and a few perfect things: a Whistler etching of Venice, a Chinese scroll painting of herons, a Japanese screen. It was like Karen, who in her shining rectitude seemed to repudiate New England buccaneer forebears who had forced opium on the Orient, to have preserved a handful of artifacts, reverenced almost with an air of apology. She pointed cheerfully now, when she saw him, to the empty chair beside her, and he slipped into it with relief. After he had told her about the ladies at dinner, with the freedom of the perennial guest to whom much is allowed, he drew her attention to a Japanese lady across the room, a businesswoman from Tokyo, whose company was a client of Lars’s.

  “One thing I learned in Japan, Karen, is that everything we heard of those people was the direct opposite of the truth. People used to say they would fight to the last Nipponese soldier. And what did they do? Laid down their arms very sensibly the moment it became apparent the game was up. We also used to say they lived in the past. Now we see that they’re the most modern people on the globe. Look at your guest of honor. A generation ago in Tokyo, women, like children, were meant to be seen and not heard. But that lady could take the sharpest trader in our garment district to the cleaner’s!”

  “Do I detect in your tone a hint that the change has not been altogether for the better?”

  “You mean that I don’t approve of women in business? No, I have no such prejudice. So long as they don’t get too mannish.”

  “Is efficiency mannish?”

  “Not necessarily. What I hate to see happening is Japanese women losing their essential seductiveness. The geisha girl, for example, carried the art of pleasing to a degree unequaled in the annals of eroticism.”

  Karen stared. “That is one business, I take it, you believe that women should always be in?”

  “Most emphatically.”

  “And where did you learn of the art of the geisha?”

  “In Japan. During the occupation.”

  “I suppose as a naval officer you had to read all the reports of that kind of thing.”

  “No, Karen. I learned it at first hand. I had a wonderful girl in Sasebo.”

  She seemed a bit breathless at his candor. Her lips formed a frozen half-smile as she sought the right note. “You mean a kind of Madame Butterfly?”

  “Except there was no dishonesty. No betrayal. She and I understood each other perfectly.”

  “So that makes it all right!” Karen now allowed herself to flare. It pleased him that no consideration of his importance as a client would abate by a jot or a tittle the natural flow of her indignation. “Well, I’m certainly sorry for poor Alida!”

  “Alida never knew about it. Do you think I’d be such a cad as to tell her?”

  “You’re telling me.”

  “That’s because I trust you. I’m perfectly confident that you would never betray me to anyone in the world but your husband, and he knows about it.”

  “He does? Oh, you men. You’re all thick as thieves.”

  “Lars, anyway, is my only thief.”

  “Suppose Alida had had herself a gigolo while you were away? How would you have felt about that?”

  “I should certainly not have considered myself entitled to complain.”

  She seemed slightly taken aback by this. “Well, that’s something, I suppose. Of course, I’m sure she didn’t.”

  “I’m sure she didn’t, also.”

  “Really?” Her eyebrows soared at his presumption. “Well, would you mind telling me why I am honored with these confidences? Wouldn’t you do better to keep them to yourself?”

  “Don’t you have moments when you want to see yourself reflected in a mirror exactly as you are? Don’t you ever want to talk to someone who will listen to what you say? Well, your eyes are that mirror, Karen. I am perfectly aware that you have all kinds of New England scruples and disapprobations. But I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re honest. And I don’t know anyone but you who is.”

  “Not even Lars?”

  “Well, he’s honester since he’s been married to you.”

  She burst out laughing, but stopped when he didn’t join her. Then she suddenly seemed to fall in with his mood. “You’re not happy, Chip, are you?”

  “I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I may be as happy as it’s possible for a man like me to be. I have certainly supplemented my life in areas where I found it lacking. And I believe I have done so without causing undue pain to my primary obligations.”

  “Because those primary obligations don’t know?”

  “That’s it.”

  “But they do know, Chip. It’s not a question of telling. I’d know soon enough if Lars had a girl. No matter how discreet he was. You’ve been very frank with me. Shall I be equally frank with you?”

  “That’s what I want.”

  “If Alida doesn’t satisfy you physically, tell her why and how. Maybe she can change. You’d be surprised what can be accomplished by directness.”

  It was his turn to be taken aback. “I don’t think she could do that.”

  “You mean she couldn’t be as cuddly and cozy as a geisha?”

  “Now you’re shocking mf!”

  “You asked for it, my friend! Why, anyway, should a woman have to turn herself into a kitten? Why should a man and a woman not make love freely and proudly, as if they were doing something of which the gods could be envious?”

  “I don’t think I’d be a customer at your bordello.”

  “I’m not going to start a bordello! What you’re looking for, Chip, you may very well find at home. Isn’t that where the bluebird was?”

  He did not remember looking into eyes so clear since Mr. B’s. “It’s hard on Alida, I suppose, that I was such a different man when I married her. Then I wanted to be clear of my family and my whole background.”

  “And what has she done but tried gallantly to be each different Alida that each different Chip wanted?”

  “She’d have done far better to be herself.”

  “Do you know, Chip, that you’re a bit of a heel?”

  As he looked at her smiling lips and her unsmiling eyes, he had a vision of her making love in the high, frank manner that she had evoked. Perhaps indeed it would have been a noble experience. The bluebird, then, was not necessarily at home. “What a pity I didn’t meet you earlier!” he exclaimed.

  “Are you trying to make love to me?” She maintained her smile, but it was not altogether a pleasant one.

  “No, I’m not that much of a heel,” he said with a sigh. “Or that much of a fatuous ass.”

  Lars came up to them. “You two look pretty serious. Am I interrupting something? Or am I just in time? How about a drink?”

  Chip went with his host to the sideboard in the dining room while Karen turned to her other guests. He put a hand on Lars’s shoulder.

  “It’s like a cold shower,” he said, “to be told home truths by a beautiful woman who is totally immune to one’s charm.”

  “Oh, she’s that, all right,” Lars cheerfully agreed. “Sometimes I wonder if she isn’t immune to mine!”

  Chip reflected as he poured his drink that in all the years of his philandering he had never made love to another man’s wife. And what was more, he knew now that he never would. Perhaps that kind of virtue was inconceivable to Karen. Or perhaps, more simply, she did not, in view of his confes
sion, consider it very much of a virtue.

  16. CHIP

  FOR MONTHS after Ted Millbank’s departure from Benedict over the glass museum row, Chip had suffered from periodic attacks of acute resentment. He knew that all of his family, including Alida, felt that he had been hard on Ted, but it was impossible to defend himself so long as none of them openly accused him. What galled him most was Ted’s notion that Chip, in common with other American business executives, either rejected, or was incapable of living up to, his responsibility of bringing art to the public. It was not, God knew, that Chip wished to seek refuge in the argument that there were magnates who covered their office walls with abstract painting or filled their plazas with nonrepresentational sculpture; he understood that Ted, quite rightly, would have flung such examples back in his teeth as banal types of “conspicuous consumption.” No, what he objected to was the blindness, the asininity of Ted, common to so many of his kind, in failing to see that art could not be handed out like doughnuts and coffee. There were no Lorenzo de’ Medicis in the Chamber of Commerce for the same reason that there were no Leonardos in SoHo and no Florentines in the public squares of Manhattan. Art in the twentieth century, for all the cant about public appreciation, was a lonely affair.

  There was, Chip was beginning to admit to himself, an increasing dichotomy between the solitary reader and art lover and the vigorous, forward-looking Charles Benedict, who was lauded in Forbes and Fortune magazines for cutting costs, expanding sales and adapting his products to the need of a middle class increasing in size and affluence. If he had, however, to be nailed to the golden cross of progress with a card over his head proclaiming that to cease to grow was to decline, could he not at least keep a mind that had its own glimpses of divine equations whose truth was useless in business?

  And now came Ted Millbank, sleek and comfortable, lolling in a hot bath of married money and preaching the false doctrine that Philistines might atone for their Philistinism by convincing the multitude that they could extract the redemptive juice of beauty out of the hard shell of art by anything but a lifetime of laborious cracking. How he despised Ted!