Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  It seemed to him now that Alida tried to communicate with him seriously only when he was troubled. It was as if they had achieved a plateau in life where difficulties and incompatibilities of personality could be regarded as in abeyance, absent some crisis; as if life were a play that had no business not to run smoothly once both the principal actors had learned their lines. Alida was happy enough, he surmised, but it was not a happiness that was going to endure too many questions, and it had accordingly to be significant when she asked one morning at breakfast, regarding him silently with quizzical eyes over her raised coffee cup, “Chip, what is it?”

  “What is what?”

  “You’ve been totally preoccupied for days. You hardly know I’m here.”

  “Actually, we’re faced with a rather nasty proxy battle. Something called Barnheim Industries has been picking up our stock. I’ve asked Lars to come up from New York to see what’s what.”

  “With Karen?” Alida was very fond of Lars’s wife. “Couldn’t we ask them to stay with us?”

  “Sure, if you’d like.”

  “But that isn’t it, is it? I mean what you’re really worried about. You rather like a battle, actually, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do.” He was faintly surprised at this sudden perspicacity. Not often now did she show such interest in his enthusiasms. “Of course, ever since we went public, I’ve known we were in danger of a takeover. But I think we can give these boys at Barnheim a run for their money.”

  “And if we lose…?”

  “Well, that’s the funny part of it. If you lose a proxy fight, you end up making even more money.”

  “Then that’s not what you’re really worried about.”

  “Oh, no? Can you imagine Daddy’s face if we lost control of Benedict?”

  “Ah, but you won’t,” she said confidently. “You never lose control of anything. Certainly not of me. So what is really wrong, dear?”

  Studying her face, he marveled as always at the preservation of her pale skin. Except for a slight puffiness under the eyes and a small increase of weight around the hips, she might still be the Alida Struthers he had courted so desperately. “It’s Ted Millbank,” he said gruffly. “And his idiotic idea that there’s something I can do about the state of the arts in Benedict.”

  “And you can’t?”

  “Not and still run the company.”

  “Couldn’t you let the museum do it?”

  “How?”

  “By having shows and classes. By sponsoring lectures for the workers. By showing beautiful things to people starved for a little beauty!”

  Was this the dark-eyed, raven-haired daughter of libertine Manhattan who had dreamed of being another Edna St. Vincent Millay? Who had once smiled at his mother as a puflfed-up frog in an exiguous puddle? Surely she had now clambered up on that lily pad beside Matilda!

  “You can’t educate people to appreciate beauty by showing them beautiful things,” he retorted. “That’s the fallacy of museums. What good does it do to show people masterpieces if they’ve never seen anything but masterpieces? Go to New York and compare the zealots at the Museum of Modern Art with the lethargic zombies who crowd dutifully through the Metropolitan. The former are there because they’ve seen hundreds of pictures and want to see more. The latter think they can take in art by osmosis. They’d be better off at the movies.”

  “I think that’s a very narrow and snobbish point of view.”

  “It comes from the heart, at least. From one who’s learned the hard way. The only person who can teach you anything real is yourself. You don’t get it from Acoustiguides drooling on about the influence of X on Y!”

  “You could try.”

  “Oh, Alida, please, I don’t want to go on with this!” he snapped in sudden exasperation. “I don’t want to get testy and mad at you.”

  She looked at him for a moment. “Do you know something, Chip? I wish to hell you would get mad at me. I wish you cared enough to!”

  He had not been quite frank with her about the office threat. The proxy battle launched by Barnheim Industries to take control of Benedict was regarded with the greatest agitation by every officer of the target except its chairman. Barnheim was a syndicate that manufactured furniture, imported Asian carpets, ran a chain of hardware stores and was making its bid to become the foremost supplier of household equipment in New England. Benedict lay geographically across the path of its advance as Poland had lain before Germany’s.

  In public, of course, Chip bore himself as a stern and beleaguered leader should. Passing groups of cheering workers in the lunch hour, he would even raise the index and middle fingers of his right hand in the Churchillian V for Victory sign. But in the secret regions of his heart he had to confess to a rather shameful sense of relief at this interruption of a routine that had begun to pall.

  For his doubts had been long growing as to the validity of what he was accomplishing with the company. He knew that his father was a silent disbeliever in his son’s idea of “progress.” Elihu had been a devoted believer in high-quality glassware—the perfect product for the perfect clientele. Yet the old man had said nothing. How could he? What alternative had he to offer? Everyone knew that if you didn’t go forward in business, you were fated to drop behind. So there they were. They had to go forward. They had to go forward till they dropped in their tracks. But did that mean that it was wicked to welcome the diversion of a proxy war?

  Surely, at least, it was permissible to find relief in battle. Chip had little difficulty in convincing himself that whatever the degradation of Benedict’s product, it would be as lovely as the finest Venetian glass compared with what a victorious Barnheim would produce, and he lashed himself into a near frenzy of enthusiasm as the campaign was initiated. Suits against Barnheim were launched in five different states; the syndicate was accused of everything from antitrust violations to swindling its own shareholders. Private investigators were employed to examine the personal lives of its officers and directors; accountants were retained to pore over its books in search of fraud and tax violations.

  “I haven’t seen you so aroused since the war!” Lars exclaimed with a laugh when Chip read aloud to him the report of a Barnheim executive who had indecently assaulted an office boy in the washroom.

  “But it is war! And these people are as bad as any we fought in the last one.”

  “Isn’t that going a bit far? Why can’t we just put it that they believe in cheap products? We’re fighting for high manufacturing standards, not morals.”

  Chip did not like this, so he remained silent. Even if his standards were higher than those of the enemy, they were still not noble enough to be emblazoned on standards in a holy war.

  “Does it ever strike you,” he asked Lars in sudden gloom, “that everything we accomplish is negative? What’s my job up here? Getting bugs out of the machinery. Fighting sloppiness and inefficiency or worse. And when the big crisis strikes, and we’re up in arms, what’s it all about? Keeping the bad guys from taking over the works. Negative, always negative.”

  “But isn’t that true of everything? As a lawyer I spend my life saving people from taxes and lawsuits. If I were a doctor, I’d be saving my patients from diseases. Or as a minister, I’d be keeping my flock from wickedness. Ever since Eve bit that apple, we’ve had to keep weeding the Garden of Eden.”

  “You think there’s no way, then, to be creative?”

  “Well, artists always claim that they’re that, don’t they? Why don’t you write a play or paint a picture?”

  “Ah, but that’s just it!” Chip pounced on it. “What do they create? I mean the best of them. They create pictures of nothingness, of violence and despair. Like Beckett in Godot. Or Gorky in his terrible last painting of the black monk. Or Picasso in Guernica. Or Sartre or Camus.”

  Lars assumed the amiable, patient look that went all the way back to their bull sessions at Yale. “What the hell are you driving at?”

  “Simply that I keep getting
back to what I thought as a kid. That the world is rotten, rotten to the core. That there never was any Garden of Eden. And that the only way we can find any life that’s worth living is by seeking out and destroying the rot.”

  “I don’t suppose you have very far to seek.”

  “No, it’s everywhere, of course. And if you can’t find it, look inside yourself!”

  “And what is the reward for the victorious eradicator of rot? A harp in the New Jerusalem?”

  Chip shook his head emphatically. “There isn’t any reward. The fight is its own compensation. But maybe that’s better than nothing.”

  Lars shrugged. Clearly he had had his quota of moral speculation for the day. “It all sounds pretty bleak to me. But I hope it helps you send the Barnheim wolves spinning down to hell.”

  When Chip returned to his office after this talk, which occurred at his now daily lunch with Lars in the officers’ dining room, he sat at his desk for several minutes in what seemed to him a sudden stupor. He closed his eyes at last and shook his head to pull himself together. But no, this seizure—or whatever it was—was not going to go easily away. It was as if someone had approached him from behind and flung a black hood over his head and shoulders, securing it around his neck with the biting cord of depression. It was appalling that the entire structure of his confidence and happiness seemed to have been blown apart in a single conversation. But had not such things been known? Whoever, whatever it was that had been piling up a demolition arsenal in his moral basement must have been silently at work for a long time. And now the world was suddenly worn and gray. It was as if he were a Saul on the road to Damascus who would never get there. The vision had come too late. What vision?

  He told his secretary that he would take no calls and see no one, and he spent the afternoon reading his files on the proxy fight. He was particularly struck by a passage from the brief of counsel to one of the directors of Barnheim, an attorney well known in Connecticut for his high-mindedness and distinguished public service.

  “The management of Benedict appear to believe they have a mandate from on high to run a business that really belongs to the public. To keep Barnheim from realizing a sane and practicable plan of coordinating certain household industries in New England, the officers of Benedict feel justified in harnessing federal and state justice systems to their ruthless chariot so that judges and juries throughout the land must divert their time from the needs of our citizens to determine fabricated claims and evaluate character assassinations.”

  That evening when he came home he found Lars and Karen Alversen in the living room with Alida. Lars was at the bar, mixing drinks.

  “How nice!” Karen’s large blue eyes and big forehead gleamed with her frank welcome. “We thought you were never coming home.”

  Chip responded only with a brief nod and perfunctory smile. He took the drink that Lars handed him and went straight to the point.

  “Has it ever occurred to you that we’re shysters?”

  “Leave that role to me, old boy. You’d better concentrate on being the client.”

  “No, seriously, Lars. Didn’t we learn in law school that a good lawyer never initiates a lawsuit except to recover money or prevent an irreparable harm? Do any of our suits fall into either category?”

  “Well, I concede the recovery of money may not be the real purpose. But what about the prevention of harm?”

  “The purchase of our stock on the open market is hardly a harm. Didn’t we put it there to be bought?”

  “Not if it results in the destruction of an old and distinguished business.”

  “That you and I happen to believe the present management is a boon to Benedict doesn’t mean a purchaser of our stock is bound to think so.”

  Lars seemed ready to give it up. He gazed for a moment into his glass. “All right, then, let’s be good shysters. Let’s at least win.”

  Chip turned abruptly to Lars’s wife. “What do you think, Karen?”

  “But, Chip, I’m hardly a businessman.”

  “You know right from wrong.”

  “I try.”

  “Then tell me what you’d do in my situation. Would you drop the suits?”

  Karen glanced at her husband, not, Chip instantly felt, as seeking permission but to give him the chance to speak first in a matter that more directly concerned him.

  “Go ahead, darling. Tell him.”

  “Oh, I’d drop the suits, yes,” she replied, with only the glint of a smile. She had no wish to understate the seriousness of the matter.

  “Even if it meant the loss of the company?”

  “Well, there’s always a price for doing the right thing, isn’t there?”

  “But such a great one, Karen!” Alida burst suddenly into the argument. “Think of the family. Think of my father-in-law.”

  “Lars told me you’d all be even richer if you lost.”

  “But we’re not fighting just for the money!” Alida exclaimed indignantly.

  “That does complicate matters, doesn’t it?” Karen, sensing the embroilment of Chip and Alida, tried tactfully to withdraw. “Well, aren’t you glad I’m not on your board?”

  “No, I don’t think I am, Karen,” Chip responded gravely. “I like your directness. It clears the air. You’re not devious, like Lars.”

  “Or sentimental, like me.” Alida retorted. “Go ahead, say it! I don’t know what gets into you, Chip, but you always have to go against everybody. Isn’t it perfectly obvious that we’re fighting for our very lives against a gang of pirates?”

  “If it were obvious,” Chip replied, “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

  Alida became silent at this, as she always did when she was frightened—he hated doing this to her, but how could he help it?—and the always diplomatic Lars changed the subject to that of his own golf score.

  Chip was uncomfortably aware in the next days of the persistence of the hollow feeling inside of him. It was as if his substance were dripping away, oozing out of a leak; as if it could be only a matter of time before the Chip Benedict who attended so efficiently to his daily tasks became a finely wrought simulacrum of the business executive and community leader. And then there would come to him the image of a dummy that was no longer even a dummy but simply something that existed in the eye of the would-be beholder, like the clothes of the naked emperor. There were moments now when his heart would seem to pump sudden wrath. Was it nothing to have doubled the gross revenues of the company and brought prosperity to the town? Was it really nothing to have made Benedict more famous than his grandfather had? “Why can I get nowhere with life?” he asked Lars at lunch.

  “In life or with life?”

  “With life. I suppose I’ve got somewhere in life. But it keeps turning back and slugging me. I tried to be my own boss at Yale and at law school, and it almost killed my parents. I tried to be a good soldier in the war, and I turned into a bloodhound. Then I decided, what the hell, I’d start all over again. I was going to be a good son, a good manager. And what have I become? A crook!”

  “A crook!” Lars glanced about in mock alarm. “Lower your voice, please. Have your fingers strayed into the company till?”

  “You know what I mean. You agreed we were shysters.”

  “A shyster is not necessarily a crook.”

  “He’s a moral crook.”

  “Remember what Holmes said: the life of the law is not logic but experience. We have to keep up with the times. The word ‘shyster’ must be redefined each generation to keep it from taking in the most distinguished practitioners at the bar.”

  “But it’s all downhill. Morally.”

  “Well, morals, too, my dear Chip, are hardly fixed things. They go up as well as down. We may no longer believe that a son is morally bound to pay his father’s debts, but neither do we think a woman taken in adultery should be stoned.”

  “Are you telling me, Lars, that everything we’re doing to save our management of Benedict is morally justified?”

>   “Well, perhaps you went a bit far in investigating the private lives of some of the officers of Barnheim. But we can cut that off.”

  Chip wondered whether he did not envy Lars. Wasn’t it enviable to be able to see the foibles of the world so clearly and to accept so easily, even so gracefully, one’s own helplessness to do anything much about it? Lars kept his moral fingernails as clean as he could; it would hardly help to plunge them into the mud. Nor would it clean the mud. But it was all right for Lars, because Lars had always been that way.

  “Karen sees it more clearly,” Chip said bluntly.

  “Karen lives in a world of her own.”

  “But I’m wondering if that isn’t the world I want to live in, too.

  “Karen doesn’t have to manage and defend large businesses. She can afford delicate scruples.”

  “Lars, all you’re saying is that there are two codes: one for the active and one for the passive. I can’t buy that.”

  Lars said nothing for a minute. Then he sighed. “You’ve been in such a funny mood lately that I’ve been wondering how to tell you something. We received another offer from Barnheim this morning.”

  “You’re afraid I’ll take it?”

  “It’s surely a hard one to turn down. The name Benedict to be retained. Something like Barnheim-Benedict, to be worked out. All officers, including yourself, to be given five-year contracts. And a stock offer that would almost double your wealth.”

  Chip laughed harshly. “It’s as if God had bribed Saul on the road to Damascus!”

  “You mean you’re tempted?”

  “It might be my one chance to live!”

  “You are tempted.”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Perhaps. If Elihu Benedict weren’t my old man.”

  Chip’s brief elation collapsed under the fall of this black curtain. “Let’s have a look at those terms,” he said curtly.

  17. CHIP