Honorable Men

by Louis Auchincloss

  “I’m perfectly capable of making up my own mind,” I replied. “But yes, I think I do disapprove of the war. Why should we care if the South Vietnamese go communist? At least, why should we care more than they do?”

  Eleanor nodded like an approving schoolteacher. “I guess that’ll do for a start. Keep an open mind, and we’ll make you a zealot. But seriously, Mother, the work would do you good. If you go on with your regime of cards and gin, you’ll end up in an institution.”

  “Eleanor! What are you saying?”

  “Well, can you deny it?”

  Could I? I was thunderstruck. It had not crossed my addled and preoccupied mind that I could present such a picture of futility to my indifferent and largely absent daughter. And then, very suddenly, it struck me that I couldn’t bear to have her think what she was thinking. Anything was better than that.

  “All right! I’ll work for you.”

  “Splendid. Come to the office tomorrow.”

  “What will I do?”

  “Well, we’ll start by giving you reports to read. And when you’re indoctrinated, you can begin addressing letters.”

  “But I can’t even type, Eleanor!”

  “You can write out the envelopes, then. Never mind, I’ll find something. Maybe you can answer the telephone. The great thing is to do what you can.”

  I actually went to Eleanor’s office the next day. It was a small affair, one floor of an old brownstone, dirty and cluttered, but the young, chain-smoking people who filled it were friendly and enthusiastic and greeted me warmly. A nice young man taught me about the telephone, and I even wondered whether I had not found my niche at last.

  Chip was roundly disgusted when I told him about it that night.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m doing what I want, for a change. I’m doing my own thing.”

  “But have you thought it through? Do you honestly and truly feel yourself justified in trying to hamper your government where the very lives of our soldiers may be at stake?”

  “I don’t see why it wouldn’t save their lives to stop the fighting.”

  “And what about our national honor? What about our commitment to world freedom?”

  “I don’t want to discuss it, Chip. You always throw facts at me that I can’t rebut. I know what I feel; that’s the point.”

  “But I’ve got to make you see it!” He was suddenly very agitated, more than seemed warranted by what he obviously deemed my ineptitude. “Can’t you take in that this is the first real moral challenge we’ve had since Pearl Harbor? And that we’ve actually elected to meet it without using the bomb? That we’ve chosen to fight not a war, but a duel, and with prescribed weapons? We, who could annihilate Hanoi with a single blow! It’s … well, it’s magnificent! It restores honor to a cynical globe.”

  I declined to reply to his argument, which struck me as almost irrational, but I did think it might be a good idea to have a family confrontation on the issue, and I invited the children to dinner the following night for this announced purpose. They at least would be able to answer him. Dana had just come back to New York, and he agreed, reluctantly, to come. Eleanor, insisting that it was a waste of time, also accepted. After all, I was working for her; she owed me something.

  My idea was that we should first have a very good dinner, just the four of us, at which the war would not be discussed, and then retire to the library to have it out. Eleanor was rather sullenly silent during our scantily enjoyed meal. Dana drank too many cocktails and told a couple of silly stories. Chip, of course, was utterly at ease. He filled the silences with a rather interesting account of new exhibits at the Bronx Zoo. I knew with a sinking heart that he was not going to lose his temper. He was determined to win, and, of course, as usual, would win—at least the debate. Dana and Eleanor were bound to get fretful. I was already beginning to regret my idea.

  When we had taken our seats in the library around a table with coffee cups and brandy glasses, Chip gravely opened the discussion.

  “You seem to be running a considerable office, Eleanor. Do you mind telling me how it’s financed?”

  Eleanor, smoking and inhaling deeply, gazed at him with an expression of barely restrained irritation. “I thought you’d ask that. How is it relevant to the war?”

  “It’s relevant because we’re talking about the war and us.”

  “Oh, Chip, you know Ellie’s paying for it!” I broke in impatiently.

  “Pardon me, Alida, I did not know it. I suspected it, of course. But Eleanor most certainly did not see fit to consult me about any proposed dissipation of family funds.”

  “Family funds, Dad? Didn’t Grandpa leave me that money? Haven’t I a right to do with it as I choose?”

  “A legal right, certainly. But that money was left to you by your grandfather at my request. It was part of an overall family estate plan. It was never intended that it should be dissipated across the nation to sow dissension and foster treason.”

  Chip’s tone was so matter-of-fact that the dynamite in his last words took us all by surprise. Eleanor laughed scornfully.

  “I doubt the Benedict money was ever better spent.”

  “How come, Dad,” Dana put in, “that Eleanor can blow her money and I can’t touch mine?”

  “Your grandfather and I decided that I should have discretion over your income and principal until you were thirty, Dana. We thought there was an element of emotional volatility in your nature that would take time to straighten out. We be lieved that Eleanor was stabler. We were wrong. About Eleanor, that is.”

  “Oh, Chip, don’t be so cold and detached! These are your children, after all.”

  “I am being deliberately detached, Alida. I hope I am not being cold. I certainly don’t feel cold. In my opinion a man who is old enough to contemplate deserting his country in time of war is old enough to be told the truth in matters of financial planning.”

  “Let him go on, Mummie!” Dana cried, furious. “Give him all the rope he needs to hang himself.”

  As I saw Chip’s cold gaze upon his only son, I felt a sudden panic as to what his real motives might be. Did he want to goad his children into a breach?

  “Let’s not fly off the handle,” Eleanor intervened. “Let’s get on to the war itself. Are you prepared to tell us, Dad, that in your considered opinion it is a wise war?”

  “Wise? Perhaps not. Had I been President, I should never have instituted so massive a military presence on the Asian mainland. It can hardly be justified on economic grounds, and probably not even on grounds of national security.”

  “If you really believe that,” Eleanor followed up in astonishment, “how can you defend such wickedness?”

  “You’re begging the question, Eleanor. I never said it was wicked. I do not believe that it is wicked. On the contrary, I think it’s rather noble. I…”

  “Noble! That holocaust!”

  “My dear, will you let me finish? To me there is something fine about coming to the rescue of the little guy who’s getting kicked around. Stepping in between the victim and the bully, even when the victim happens to be no great shakes. That to me is the perennial role of America. We kicked the British out in 1781. We rescued our seamen from impressment in 1812. We freed the slaves. We liberated Cuba. We beat the Kaiser out of Berlin and drove Hitler to his bunker. We saved South Korea. We…”

  “Ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta!” intoned Dana mockingly.

  “Really, Dad, can’t you save it for the Fourth of July?”

  Chip was imperturbable. “Very well, children. I’m a tin-pan patriot. What are you? What do you believe in?”

  Eleanor was clear. “I believe in allowing other countries to make their own decisions about their own political problems. I do not believe in teaching democracy to ignorant peasants by blowing up their huts and rice paddies.”

  “Or drafting the youth of America to die in undeclared and illegal warfare!” Dana added.

  “All I am say
ing,” Chip insisted, “is that Hanoi is forcing red rule on a people that have neither asked nor voted for it. It strikes me that that is an evil thing to do. To oppose an evil thing, even by force, may be impracticable. But to me it cannot be wrong. If a thousand men die to prevent the murder of one, it may be foolish, but it is still fine!”

  “If they’re volunteers!” Dana exclaimed. “But should you draft them to die in vain?”

  “That, I admit, is a point,” his father conceded. “But in these matters I believe one must obey one’s government. Disobedience can be justified only by some grave moral cause. If it is a question of judgment, the individual should not pit his against his country’s.”

  “But lack of judgment,” Eleanor argued, “can be carried to an extreme where it becomes a crime.”

  “I shan’t be drafted, Dad. I promise you that! Even if I have to skip the country!”

  “I did not expect to persuade either of you to a different view,” Chip said gravely. “This conference was your mother’s idea. But it gives me the opportunity to tell you both that I deem it my duty to counteract, insofar as I can, the unpatriotic acts of my children by my own, I hope more patriotic ones. I intend now to offer my services to the government in any capacity in which it sees fit to employ them. And I shall contribute to patriotic causes a sum at least equal to what Eleanor has spent.”

  Chip rose and left the room abruptly after making this speech, and he did not return that night. I found out later that he had taken the shuttle to Washington. What he was doing there I neither knew nor cared, for in the next week my mind and heart were entirely taken up with my son. Dana’s draft number came up, and he left a note with my doorman that he was catching a plane to Stockholm.

  20. CHIP

  WHEN CHIP accepted the commission of Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, with the particular mission of engendering support for the American cause in Vietnam among the nations of Southeast Asia, he and Alida had the most violent scene of their marriage. It took place when he returned from a trip to Washington unexpectedly late at night to find her before the television set with a bottle of whiskey. He realized too late that he should have postponed discussion of his new job until morning.

  “You can’t be serious!” she cried, her eyes flickering with a kind of panic. “But what am I saying? You’re always serious. You were born serious. You’re doing this to spite me!”

  “I guess you’d better sleep on it. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  “We’ll talk right now! What do you think this will do to your children? To have you running a war they’re risking their very lives to oppose!”

  “It won’t help to be melodramatic, Alida. A man has to do what he believes is right.”

  “A man! That’s all you can think of, isn’t it? Your masculinity. And now you’ve got to prove it again, for the umpteenth time, by showering bombs on helpless peasants.”

  “That’s an absurd oversimplification.”

  “Oh, I know, you’re fighting the red menace. You wouldn’t listen to the children when they tried to talk sense into you. What are you trying to do, Chip? Destroy them?”

  He glanced in distaste from that angry, pouting face to the empty glass on the table. Alida’s beauty had been eroded by her indulgences; there were bags under her eyes, and he could detect already the threat of a second chin. A gust of anger at the thought of the waste of it all rustled through him. But the sudden storm that followed it in a flash and that now tightly gripped every part of his throbbing being was a passionate resentment.

  “My children! When have they bothered to give me the smallest consideration? When Eleanor blew her money, did she take the trouble to consult me? When Dana decided to disobey the law of the land and slink off to Europe to avoid the consequences, did he see fit to discuss it with me?”

  “But, Chip, you made them feel it was hopeless to argue with you!”

  “Because they knew they wouldn’t convince me. It’s true they couldn’t have. But it’s equally true that I hadn’t a prayer of convincing them. At least I tried. At least I kept the doors open. Until they slammed them in my face!”

  As he spoke, a sobering question struck him. Did he actually dislike Ellie and Dana? Dislike his own children? But yes, he did, and why not? Could any man, after years of patience, help giving in to a revulsion of feeling when he never met anything but rebuff? Oh, the smug, smirking condescension of youth!

  “I promise you one thing, Alida. I’ll always be ready to take them back. Always ready to support them financially, no matter what they do. But for the moment I’m fed up with both of them.”

  “And with me, too, I suppose.”

  “I thought there the shoe was on the other foot. Are you coming to Washington with me?”

  “Do you want me?”

  “Of course I want you. I’ve rented a house, fully furnished. It even has a couple that go with it. All you have to do is lock the door here and open it there.”

  “Taken a house!” she cried, exasperated. “Taken a house without consulting me? Is that your way of persuading me to move?”

  “I’ve taken the house you said you wanted to live in if you ever had to live in Washington. The yellow brick one on S Street that Lars and Karen had when he was in the Pentagon. It even has a little pool in the garden.”

  A pause showed that she was touched, in spite of herself. “Oh? That is a lovely house.”

  “How about it? Will you come?”

  “Give me time to think it over.”

  “All the time you want. But I’m starting on Monday. However, that doesn’t matter. We can run two households as long as you need. Georgetown will be there waiting for you.”

  “Oh, Chip, I’ll think it over, of course, but won’t you, too? Is it absolutely imperative that you support this hideous war?”

  But he had no idea of getting into another fruitless argument, and he dropped the discussion, suggesting that she had better go to bed. The next morning he left for Washington before she was up. It was evident that they would not meet again before he had taken his oath of office.

  He was not sorry to leave New York. He had discovered what he had not been wholly surprised to discover: that the fiduciary of a charitable institution, in the absence of an administrative crisis, was expected only to give or raise money. This, however, had been acceptable to him, and he had thrown himself into the job with all of his energy. What he had been less willing to accept was the tendency to vulgarization in the arts and sciences. Culture had become “big business,” with big shows for bigger crowds, and Chip had begun to feel that he might as well be back in the glass business, making shabbier products for higher prices under Elihu’s disapproving eye. The fact that that eye had been removed to a higher sphere would not have made it less disapproving.

  What was it but another confirmation that the world was made up of alloy? That the poor Albigenses, whose brutal extinction he had deplored as a boy in Albi Cathedral, had been right, and that the creating force had built whatever was out of badness? How could he escape the conclusion when he saw all around him the ineluctable evolution of nobility into fatuity?

  He had overstated his case for the war, deliberately, to the children. Certainly he had little enthusiasm for its continuance. Common sense and discretion called for an early pullout. But so long as the powers that were had decided against it, was it a crime to get a kick—all right, call it just that!—out of hacking at the green scaly neck that bore the head of the dragon? Gerry Hastings had said the enemy was a state of mind. Well, surely Moscow and Hanoi were aspects of that state. If there was value in nothing but the opposition to evil, at least one could oppose!

  In his first six months at the Department he was so busy that it hardly mattered whether or not Alida moved to Washington. His existence seemed to have changed from a slow silent movie to a hectic newsreel. He had to read every intelligence report from every embassy, consulate and military post in Southeast Asia; he had to peruse every letter volunt
eered from a traveler or businessman. He was sent on a flying trip to Singapore, Bangkok and Saigon. When he was not reading, he was dictating, endlessly turning out memoranda on different ways of justifying the American presence. In Washington he worked nights and often weekends. His life had become a blur of airports, uniforms, jeeps and long, shiny limousines, of gravely shaking heads bent over maps, of paper, paper, paper.

  Alida did at last come down to Georgetown, but she kept the New York apartment and spent more than half of every month in it. She had given up her job with Eleanor because of her nervous tension over Dana, and she said that she could not survive without her bridge sessions. Her drinking was now so much worse that any social life was out of the question. After a few cocktails she would denounce the war in terms that made it desirable that none of his associates be present. Having at first tried to loosen her ties to Manhattan, Chip now began to look forward to her departures to the north.

  His only real friend was his secretary, with whom he spent most of his time. Violet Crane was twenty-nine, with a fine full figure, strong features, curly blond hair and sympathetic, yellow-tan eyes through which radiated a character so warm as to make her everybody’s friend. She had a tendency to be disorganized in small matters, mislaying her purse, leaving her coat in the cafeteria, always forgetting her cigarettes. But her work was first-rate, and she was willing to put in any number of hours.

  Chip soon discovered that her background was not unlike Alida’s. She was listed in the New York Social Register, but she had no income other than what she earned.

  “Mummie likes to call us nouveaux pauvres,” she told him on the first night that he took her out to dinner after work. “But it seems to me we’re rather vieux in that galère. You have to go back a couple of generations to find the first butler.”