by Louis Begley
Great country, Poland, observed Archie, and when did you come to live here, just before the war?
No, in ’47.
Really, and where were you during the war?
In Poland.
Your parents as well?
Yes.
He had given these laconic answers pleasantly enough, in an even voice. Nonetheless, Archie had apparently decided that he had gone far enough. He patted Henry on the shoulder and said that someday he would like to hear the whole story of his war experiences. With that we entered the Union, got silverware, which Henry and I, having already eaten there, had learned to put into the breast pocket of our jackets, and got into line to be served the main course.
II
IT IS SAID that no one who had not lived under the ancien régime could claim to know the sweetness of life. The dignified comfort of undergraduate life at Harvard in the early 1950s may have become equally unimaginable. There was nothing unusual in my sharing with two roommates a suite in one of the older dormitories composed of a living room I remember as large and three bedrooms, each capacious enough to hold a desk and a couple of chairs in addition to the bed. If we had happened to live in a newer dorm, our suite would have included a bathroom. In our building, the toilets and showers at the end of the hall on each floor were communal. Elderly Irish maids, affectionately referred to as biddies, cleaned and made beds every day except Sunday. For a small payment they also washed socks and underwear. A laundry company sponsored by the university took away sheets and pillowcases and brought them back washed and ironed; I am almost certain that the sight of an undergraduate using a Laundromat was as yet unknown. According to legend, biddies helped themselves to any liquor they found in an undergraduate’s room. No such thing ever happened to me. On the other hand, I never failed to offer my biddy a drink, regardless of the hour, if I was there when she arrived. The one who looked after me when I was a junior had an avowed passion for curaçao, and I made sure I always had a bottle on hand. Upperclassmen lodged in houses inspired by the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge and built during the regime of President Lowell, before the war. One of the houses was named for him. Each had a dining room, common rooms, and a library, the quality of which varied from house to house, as well as a resident master and a complement of resident and nonresident tutors. The disappearance of waiters from the house dining room and the Freshman Union, and the institution of cafeteria-style self-service, were recent and much lamented cost-cutting measures.
In terms of social cachet, no freshman dormitory was better than any other: the annual turnover of the population made it impossible for them to acquire an individual personality. At most, you weighed better plumbing in the new dorms against higher ceilings and bigger rooms in the older buildings. Houses were a different matter. Their characteristics and standing depended on the success of the master’s efforts to screen undergraduate applicants and woo tutors of note. Two houses were recognized to be at the top of the social and intellectual pecking order, scholarship and academic success counting for almost everything in one, so that slovenly or eccentric grinds were tolerated if they were high achieving. The talent and accomplishments of many of the tutors and undergraduates in the other house were as great. However, an undergraduate’s brilliance did not always assure admission. In his restless search for perfection, the master was guided by instinct, not unlike that by which the captains or chefs de salle at the Stork Club, “21,” or Maxim’s could determine at a glance whether a diner should be let in the door and at which table he should be seated. Like his counterparts in the world of elegant dining, the master aspired to the composition of a social bouquet worthy of a great salon, one that in this case needed to be refreshed each year. He yearned for undergraduates whose personal attributes and ancestry merited the appellation of “American orchids”—which he readily bestowed, for example, on every descendant of John Adams who was not known to have been publicly disgraced. Sons and grandsons of foreign celebrities had an almost equal claim on his imagination, above all when he found it possible to match and mix them to brilliant advantage, as when he pulled off the coup of putting together as roommates the grandsons of the greatest living French painter, a billionaire Eastern potentate, and the most famous of Irish writers. Against my better judgment, in the second semester of our freshman year, when it was necessary to attend to such matters, Henry, Archie, and I applied for admission to that house. I felt uneasy about the project and considered opposing it, but I would have had to disclose my reasons and in the end went along with it. My annoyance took the form of sulking. I hardly opened my mouth during the interviews, first with the senior tutor, Thomas Peabody, a medievalist whose course I was taking, and then with the master. The latter, when we were admitted into his study, was squirming in an oversize armchair and crossing and recrossing his legs, which he finally tucked under himself. His questions were all addressed to Henry. He professed to be puzzled and amused—those words were repeated more than once—by Henry’s background, which he pronounced was unusual, as well as by his friendship with Archie and me.
White, he finally asked, do you feel entirely at ease with your roommates?
Henry was ready for him.
I’ve never felt entirely at ease with anyone, he answered. I can’t imagine what that would be like.
How extraordinary, cried the master, exactly my own feelings! Une âme sœur!
That outburst of sympathy notwithstanding, a couple of weeks later Henry and Archie received a letter, signed by Peabody, informing them that they had been assigned to a dormitory for upperclassmen who had not been admitted to any of the houses. Of course, the letter continued, Messrs. White and Palmer would be affiliated with the house for all other purposes, in particular meals and the use of the library, and, if a suitable vacancy became available by the beginning of their junior year, or even later, they would be considered for it. If one took into account only the quality of the lodgings, this result could be regarded as a blessing, the dormitory in question being a sumptuous edifice dating from the first decade of the twentieth century. It contained no less sumptuous suites. However, people who cared about such things considered it a warehouse for deviants. The blow was harsh. It could have made trouble between Henry and Archie, because Henry believed that without him Archie would have been accepted. Being a man of honor, Archie took the stand that they were equally undesirable and could not be budged from it.
In the end, there was no trouble with me either. I had told them, before all three of us applied to the house, that I would request a single suite, in preference to sharing a suite with them. The reason I gave was that there was no chance of our being given three bedrooms and a living room and so continuing our current living arrangement. Their immediate response was that I could have the room with only one bed, and they would share, but I held firm, although I would have liked to be with Henry. Single suites were rare in the houses, and I had thought of myself as likely to end up in a dormitory for rejects, living alone. I was astonished to be told by Peabody that a junior who had been living in a single suite was withdrawing from the college and that I was welcome to take his place.
The constraints of our cosseted college existence may seem equally unimaginable. They were premised on a tacit conviction that one goal of higher education was to delay sexual activity of the young by encouraging participation in arduous sports and limiting opportunities for private contacts between the sexes. Thus, only male undergraduates lived in the Harvard College dormitories and houses. There were, in fact, no female students at the college, but a formula known as coinstruction installed a small female minority of Radcliffe girls in all courses except astronomy and physical education. The former called for stargazing expeditions that might have afforded opportunities for misconduct. As for the latter, the presence of girls in a men’s sports facility was unthinkable. That Radcliffe students were girls, while we were men, was a principle of diction I never heard challenged. Strict regulations, known as parietal rules, governed vi
sits by the other sex to Harvard dormitories and houses. Girls’ dormitory rooms were always off-limits; however, you could wait for your date in the ground floor sitting room of her dormitory, a space that I later realized weirdly resembled parlors at the better sort of funeral homes. During our freshman year, girls were allowed in men’s dormitories between four and seven in the afternoon; in the years that followed, the hours were gradually lengthened until, by the time I was a senior, on Saturdays—and perhaps Fridays as well—girls were not required to leave before eleven. On the stroke of that hour, couples streamed out of the houses and dormitories with haggard faces and hair wet from the shower, evidence of amatory exertions followed by attention to personal hygiene. Compliance with the rules required also that girls be signed in and signed out on a list maintained by the resident proctor of the dormitory or by the porter of the house. They were to be entertained in the living room of the suite, with the door to the hallway left ajar, so that a proctor or a tutor could, if so inclined, peek in and satisfy himself that nothing more intimate than conversation and its necessary adjuncts, smoking and drinking, could be discerned.
Ever since I first met Henry and Archie, I had marveled—no less I suppose than the cagey housemaster—at the administrative process that, plucking us out from a class of some thousand freshmen, had made us roommates. Were we the last three members of our class for whom lodging had to be found, or were the rooms we were given the only remaining unassigned accommodations? Were such matters settled by a roll of dice on the crimson carpet lining the floor of some assistant dean’s office? According to my roommates, neither of them had filled out the college form asking one’s preferences with regard to roommates. I had completed and mailed it on time in the envelope provided by the administration, but the only wish I stated was against living with alumni of any of the New England prep schools and in favor of men from other parts of the country. A good half of the class must have met those criteria. I gave as a reason my desire to get to know people of different backgrounds. This was true as far as it went. I had, however, a more urgent, unexpressed motive, which was to stay clear of undergraduates with roots in my native Berkshires and anyone else possibly acquainted with my parents or their reputation. I must have realized that the barrier I hoped to erect was porous. Indeed, had I been more determined, I would have gone to a college far away, perhaps on the West Coast. My parents wouldn’t have offered much resistance, although they considered Harvard a feather in their cap. And I certainly wouldn’t have trusted the discretion of the one member of my class, George Standish, the son of my father’s first cousin, who presumably knew all that I wished to conceal. My parents had told me that he was applying to the college; in due time, they also told me that he had been accepted. My father had even hinted, rather diffidently, that I might propose to George that we room together. I gave him an impudent stare and said that I wasn’t eager to be snubbed. Besides, I added, George would have made other arrangements long since. I was right about the second point: George’s three freshman-year roommates had all been at school with him and had all been cut from the same estimable bolt of cloth as he.
As to George’s discretion, he had given me no cause to judge it one way or the other. Our acquaintance was too slight. Had I been older and more experienced, I might have taken comfort in the fundamental lack of curiosity of most people about the lives of others. I would also have realized that the gossip about my parents was banal and, in all probability, of little interest, except to people who already knew them and their dreary story. No one else of our age would want to hear scuttlebutt about someone like my father, a pleasant enough fellow of good family who had lost or pissed away most of his money, held down a trust officer’s job at a small bank in an ugly one-industry town, lived with his wife and only son in an ancestral house too grand for his circumstances, drove an Oldsmobile to work, and played unremarkable golf at the country club. Was his case made any more piquant by the fact that the bank was run by his rich and upstanding first cousin and had been founded by his family, which still owned it? Being the younger cousin’s employee was a torment for my father, who, had he been a stronger and less indolent man, might have moved on. But that was not in his nature, and he had stayed. The rest of the stuff was tawdry and equally commonplace, consisting of such particulars as my father’s and mother’s intake of martinis before lunch and dinner and Scotch and soda after dinner (which consumption was impressive even in their circle), and the rumors of my mother’s heavy flirtations or worse with two high-living lushes, Gus Williams, the insurance broker, and Tim Clark, the real estate agent with a distinguished war record. That there might be other couples in Berkshire County with similar ill-kept secrets, and that I thought I could identify two or three of them, was cold comfort, and I do not find unreasonable my revulsion at the thought that a quirk in the admissions process—like the one that had thrown me together with Henry and Archie—could have as easily paired me with someone who might have made me feel his pity or contempt. There was also a new set of circumstances that had rocked me. When I came home for the Easter break during my last year at school, my admission to Harvard College having already become generally known, my parents told me that Mr. Hibble, the lawyer who handled most legal matters for the bank, had asked to see me at his office without them, and that I had better go. I knew Mr. Hibble from the club as a choleric tennis player. My father, with whom he naturally had many contacts, regularly referred to him as a stuffy dunderhead, but that was of no great importance to me. I expected my father to have a low opinion of anyone more successful and better paid than he, particularly if his nose was rubbed with any frequency in the dunderhead’s professional accomplishments, real or not. My curiosity about the meaning of this summons, and my parents’ categorical endorsement of it, was considerable. Although I hadn’t gotten into trouble at school and hadn’t had any run-ins with the town police that might require a lawyer’s assistance, I didn’t think that anything good could come of the meeting.
I appeared at Mr. Hibble’s office at the appointed hour and heard him say, after prefatory twaddle about my hard work and success, that he was the trustee of a trust set up by the late Mr. Horace Standish, the head of the family and my grandfather’s brother, and, that as such, he had concluded that the time had come to inform me that both my tuition and expenses at college would be paid by the trust, the trust having also paid for the boarding school I had attended. He had more to tell me. I was entitled to distributions from the income of the trust—a substantial amount but one that should not relieve me of the need to earn a living. That limitation was, to his way of thinking, all to the good. In emergencies and for good cause, I might even have access to the capital. I had not been made privy to the trust’s existence and terms sooner, he continued, because in his judgment I was too young. Then he dropped the bomb: the purpose of the trust, and the reason for Mr. Standish’s generosity, had been to make it financially prudent, indeed possible, for my parents to adopt me when it became clear that they were unable to have children of their own. Mr. Hibble had not used the word “wastrel” in reference to my father and money, but the implication hung in the air like so much smoke from his cigar. The adoption took place at birth, he added, and it had been a blessing for my parents as well as for me. When I recovered my breath, I asked whether he knew whose child I was. He replied that no one knew. At the time, these matters were done in such a way that absolute secrecy was preserved. Forever.
I drove home slowly. As it was the end of the afternoon, I knew that my parents would both be waiting for me, drinks in hand. My father offered me one as well, a gin and tonic, which I accepted. Mother cried, of course. They also offered assurances of their love, which I said were unnecessary. That was the truth. Even when I was most ashamed of them, I recognized that somehow, from beyond the river of booze, they tried their best with me, my mother in her goofy, eyelash-batting way, my father, as in all things, lazy and stiff. One could imagine that very early he had been given an injection of No
vocain good for a lifetime. He said that we should carry on as before; we need never again talk about the adoption. Only Mr. Hibble was in on it; no one knew who my other parents could be—he choked a little on that one—and your mother, he said, pointing at her lest I be confused, had taken steps to fool everyone, the family included. How much of this they believed, I couldn’t say. Old Mr. Standish, my benefactor, had pulled all the strings. What were the limits of his discretion? Or the discretion of my real parents, if they had been told or had figured out to whom they were handing over their child?
Mr. Hibble’s revelations had knocked me for a loop. But a suspect feeling of elation followed the initial shock: knowing there was no biological connection between those two and me was irrepressibly a reason to rejoice. I speculated wildly about whose child I really was. It had to be someone for whom old Mr. Standish had felt responsible. Who that was I could not imagine with my scant knowledge of the family history and ramifications, but various hypotheses might explain my marked resemblance to my father and the other Standishes: my Standish grandfather who died when I was little but whose photographs I had studied; my benefactor, Horace Standish, who died a few years later; his son Jack who ran the bank; and finally my classmate George, Cousin Jack’s only son. That resemblance might in itself furnish an additional explanation of my father’s having been allowed to hang on to his job at the bank through thick and thin, although there was in addition always the fundamental imperative: a Standish didn’t fire a Standish or publicly humiliate him. Then the question was who knew, and how much was known. The more I thought about it, the less I could believe that there had been no talk about my origins. Things must have been said within the family, particularly if, as I speculated without any basis, the trust could not have remained entirely concealed when old Mr. Standish died and his heirs read his will. Worse yet, in the locker room at the club I had heard Mr. Hibble discuss cases he was handling. He was not one to keep his mouth shut. No one had ever made a remark to me hinting that I was some sort of foundling. That could, however, be ascribed to the generally good manners of the Standish family and most of the people we knew. I wasn’t sure how much I cared. We had read that year, in my advanced English class, both The Tempest and King Lear. Confused notions of the blessings and curses of nature as contrasted with nurture, and of bastardy, swirled in my head without resolution. Sometimes I romanticized my new situation. But my dominant desire was for distance and anonymity. I discovered that it was not too late to sign up for a program that would send me to France for the summer. My parents agreed to it without protest, as did Mr. Hibble, when I telephoned to ask whether the trust would provide the financing. Then, once I got to college, I would strive to keep the Berkshire furies at bay.
