Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  III

  AS A RULE, Henry spoke with his mother on the telephone three times a week. It was up to him to call, collect. If she grew impatient, she would make the call herself. I knew all about this because I almost always worked in my room rather than the library, and, unless the radio in the living room was turned up loud, I couldn’t help overhearing snippets of their conversations. It was thus that I first deduced that there was such a rule. Its nature was later disclosed to me by Mrs. White in the course of many chats when I answered the phone and was obliged to say that Henry was out. Finally, Henry told me about it himself.

  I provided the reason for his absence according to the hour: he’s at the library, or he went to dinner early, these having proved to be the most likely to be accepted with something like good humor. If by misfortune I admitted that I didn’t know where he was or that he had gone to the movies or was out on a date, she would give me the third degree. Once, in the course of a particularly rough interrogation, I heard myself say that I was Henry’s roommate, not his keeper. To my astonishment, the crack, which I instantly regretted, didn’t slow her down. Perhaps she didn’t get it. However, if I was careful and gave the right answer, the conversation was likely to follow a boring but nonmenacing pattern. She would tell me how many hours or days had passed since she had last heard from her only son and implore me to remind Henry that he still had parents who loved him and were anxious about him. Something along the lines of “Aren’t your parents dying of worry if you don’t call?” was her customary conclusion. I never confessed that, on the contrary, my own mother and father, assuming that I caught them at home on an evening when they were sober, might panic at the sound of my voice, unless I made it clear at once that I was not telephoning in order to report a catastrophe. After I had told them I just wanted to say hello, they might either laugh in disbelief or advise me to go to the infirmary and have my temperature taken.

  Perhaps on account of certain oddities of her pronunciation and diction, I was charmed by her occasional efforts to be girlish—so different from my mother’s—and by her assumption that we were allies in the struggle to keep her son’s affections. She flirted with me, and before long we became telephone friends. She would ask about my parents and my studies, sometimes extending her inquiries to include Archie, with whom her contacts were rare, since he was seldom in the room when she telephoned, and, when he happened to be there, hardly ever picked up the receiver. He claimed that he was bad at taking messages. His own parents, like mine, never called, and he preferred to have his other calls filtered by me. Sometimes Mrs. White threw in a little compliment. For instance, she would say that it was wonderful how I was at my desk all the time, doing my homework. She addressed me as Mr. Roommate, and, although I begged her to call me Sam, she stuck to it.

  I wondered what Henry thought of the bare trickle of communication between his roommates and their respective parents. That he had noticed how different our habits were from his was certain; just as he had warned me, he noticed everything. But did he disapprove? Did he take it as a sign that our parents took little interest in us, or that we were callously neglecting our filial duties? I didn’t expect any overt disapproval; he was too polite for that. The subject came up, however, one evening, after a movie. He asked point-blank whether I called my parents at hours when he wasn’t in the room, or from a pay phone. Otherwise, it would seem that my parents and I were hardly ever in touch. The same question had occurred to him about Archie and his parents. The complications of my home life were what they were, and I wasn’t about to explain them to Henry. Instead I told him a half-truth. I said it was probably a matter of habit. I had been sent to boarding school at thirteen, and my parents and I had gotten used to my being away from home. They didn’t worry about me.

  He interjected: I’ve never been away from my mother, not until I came here.

  I said, My deal is different from yours, that’s all. I do call home, but only if something important comes up.

  But that means that you’ve lost touch with your parents.

  I replied that I did write to them from time to time, and that my mother wrote to me fairly often with Berkshire news. Henry acknowledged having seen the lavender envelopes addressed in my mother’s schoolgirl script, with her return address invariably appearing in the upper-left-hand corner. And I do telephone, I continued, I called her on her birthday only last week.

  He returned to relations among parents and sons abruptly the next day, saying that he was obliged to write twice a week and call every two days. I confessed that his mother had already told me about the calls. But it was as though he had not heard me.

  If I don’t make that call or write that letter, he continued, she makes scenes. She yells at me and yells at my father, because she claims that he isn’t strict enough with me. Then he gets pains in his chest and tells her she is driving him to his grave, and she calls to let me have it for making my father sick and breaking up their marriage. The angina is the worst part. I don’t want to be responsible for a heart attack. So I write and call, whether or not I feel like it, and whether or not I have anything to say.

  Those are difficult conversations, he added after a pause. They’re enough to make you hate the telephone.

  As an embarrassed auditor of many of them, I couldn’t disagree. In a burst of frankness, I told him that sometimes they sounded like quarrels. Henry didn’t take offense; he laughed.

  All the same, he said, I have to do it. Wondering whether there might be a two-way flow of anxiety in the White family, I asked whether he worried about his parents when he was late making one of those calls.

  No, he replied, I don’t, although perhaps I should, because of my father. It’s really my mother who’s a problem. My father doesn’t think about me from one end of the week to the other, except when he wishes I were there to chauffeur him or run errands. And of course during the scenes my mother makes about me. She claims that the only reason she stayed with him after the war was that she didn’t want to lose me and now she’s lost me anyway and somehow that’s my father’s fault.

  He laughed again. I bet he wishes he had told her to shove off and take her precious son with her! Actually, that’s unfair. I know he loves me in his own way, whatever that means, but he has other things on his mind. Such as his business and money, and how to tiptoe around my mother. But he doesn’t get worked up about me. That’s her specialty. I think she really believes that the only way to show love is by imagining catastrophes. She’ll say, I can see it: you’ve been hit by a bus, you’ve fallen down the stairs and broken your back, your appendix has burst and you’re in unbearable pain. I can already see them carrying you away. That’s not love; it’s some disastrous mutation, the worst form of selfishness.

  You’ve got to see my mother’s worrying for what it is, he continued, undeterred by my silence. Some part of it is genuine, but mostly she just wants me to toe the line. She uses the same technique on my father, but that’s a whole different story. For instance, if I don’t call because I forgot or couldn’t bring myself to do it—which does happen—she can shift the blame to me for everything that has gone wrong over there in Brooklyn. She couldn’t cook dinner because she was so worried; she dropped the Rosenthal platter on the kitchen floor because she was so nervous; my father had to take his nitroglycerin because right away he noticed the state she was in; she has spent all her time and energy on me, she hasn’t been able to make friends. This can go on and on. She worries about my father’s angina and weak heart but not enough to go easy on him. Somehow, I’m not made like them: I worry when I have a problem. Then I do something about it. My mother claims I am heartless. Sometimes, when I want to needle them, I tell them they’re right, I have no heart and therefore no pains in the chest. You should hear them afterward. The first punitive measure is to stop my allowance. They send it weekly, so it’s easier to clamp down, although the ostensible reason is that if they sent it in advance, for instance monthly, I would spend it all in two days. Of cou
rse, at a certain point after a big row I begin to feel bad. I want to make up. That means I have to apologize in at least ten different ways. If the transgression is grave, I have to apologize in writing. There is no such thing as taking in the prodigal son without first raking him over the coals.

  Henry laughed at his own joke; he had an irritating tendency to do that. In any event, I disliked his tirades and wondered how much this one owed to Dostoyevsky. We were both reading The Brothers Karamazov, and Henry had decided that it contained the answers to all the great questions that perplexed him.

  My mother had given me a Sheffield tea set she had inherited a couple years ago from her aunt Kitty and some cups and saucers. The electric hot plate and the kettle I had bought on my own initiative. When the tea was ready, we drank in silence until I broke it asking why, if the telephone calls were such a torment, he didn’t tell his parents they could save money by limiting the calls to one a week.

  That wouldn’t work, he said. My father counts every penny, but hanging on to me is a matter of life and death for my mother, so they consider the high telephone bills another inevitable consequence of having allowed me to go to Harvard. You see, they’re in a bind. They realize that they couldn’t really force me to decline admission on a full scholarship. In fact, it’s something they can brag about. But at the same time they can’t get over my having left home. They see it as an outrage. He helped himself to another cup of tea and then asked: Did your parents object when you said you wanted to go away to college?

  I said they had no practical choice. Even if I had chosen one of the two colleges that were closer to Lenox, I would have still been going away.

  He nodded. That was pretty much what Archie had told him about his own case, except that Archie’s situation was special anyway, since the Palmers lived on an army base and might be obliged to move from wherever they were on very short notice. By the way, he added, the reason my parents take it so hard is that they think I wanted to come to this place mainly to get away from them. For instance, if I had gone to Columbia, which is in the city and has a very good reputation, I could have lived at home. Even if I had lived in a dormitory, I could have taken the subway home every weekend. They’d have had me tethered. With Harvard, there is no way I can be in Brooklyn every weekend. Ergo, I’ve rejected them and must atone. But for what and how? That’s not a question I have put, but I know what they want: obedience. Obedience in every other respect. That’s what torture by the telephone is about, not to mention the rest of the stuff that you don’t even know.

  I couldn’t help telling Henry that he was describing a Hollywood cliché. The only son packs his bags and heads for State U, four hundred miles away. The girl next door has hysterics; the mother weeps but tries hard to be brave; the father makes a stern face and secretly wipes away a tear. Then the kid becomes the captain of the football team. After graduation he marries the girl, all the fraternity brothers show up at the wedding, and everybody lives happily ever after.

  Your story, I said, is just a variation on the basic plot, except that you can’t throw a long pass. Any kind of pass!

  Sure, Henry answered, that’s very funny, but we aren’t an American family with an American sense of humor. I can tell you that no matter how often my mother goes to the movies and laughs at clichés like that, she will never accept that any such thing should happen to her. Not after everything she’s been through, everything she has seen, everything she has lost. Those nice women in the movies have other children and family—parents, sisters, and brothers—and friends, old friends, to talk to and spend time with. Or they have jobs. My mother hasn’t got any of that. Except for my father and me, they’ve all been killed. She says she doesn’t have a job because she has no skills. Nobody had ever expected her to work so she never learned to do anything. I don’t really believe that. If she really wanted she could be learning how to do something useful right now, but that would mean risking failure, and that’s a risk she will not take. My father does work hard all day, and he isn’t the most cheerful man in the world. The result is that I’m my mother’s only hobby. I’m also one of the better subjects for their quarrels: It’s your fault he is like that, no it’s yours, he learned it from you, no, it’s all those years he spent with you, no, sorry, he’s the portrait of your father, and on and on. Certainly, they can fight over me even if I am in Cambridge, but why put on a show with no audience? Besides which, when I also lose my temper, the brawl becomes a world championship event.

  He lost me when he added, Please don’t misunderstand me. They love me, and I love them.

  I managed not to smile and told him I was certain he did.

  There was another lengthy silence. When he spoke again he said, Look, leaving home, isn’t that a metaphor for leaving the God of your fathers? My mother has latched on to the great metaphorical sense of my act. Brilliant, isn’t it? Even she knows that there is a limit to how long they can beat me over the head just for going away to the best college in the country, so she has put my abandonment of my parents on a loftier plane. My father has joined in. They say that my real purpose in leaving them was to stop being a Jew, or anyway to pass as a Gentile, which is something I can’t manage with them nearby. So for me, success in denying that I’m a Jew hinges on shutting them out of my life. It’s a terrifying interpretation, but they really believe it. He noticed that my eyes were closing from fatigue and said, I’m sorry to have talked your ear off. The truth is that I started this conversation only to be able to say that I envy you. I wish my parents would leave me alone. Why can’t they be like your parents? What would be wrong with that? It hasn’t done you any harm.

  I didn’t answer his question. I was realizing that, even if you put aside their peculiarities, my parents were a species with which he had no familiarity. Just as it seemed I had only the most limited understanding of his circumstances. There was no hurry, I thought, he’ll have lots of time to learn about me and my kind. Especially if our friendship lasts. I had begun to think that it might. So I said goodnight, and we went to bed.

  WHETHER HENRY WAS A JEW was a question Archie and I had discussed more than once without reaching a definite conclusion. Archie agreed with me that the family’s having been in Poland during the war was a reason to suppose that he wasn’t. We both believed that the Germans had killed all Polish Jews. The name White gave no clue, because it must have been changed. But changed from what? We also agreed that Henry didn’t look like a Jew. His address in Brooklyn pointed the other way. Brooklyn, Archie said, was where all the New York Jews lived. That left the fact that Henry was no friendlier with the three known Jews in our dormitory than with anyone else. According to Archie, that meant nothing. Or one could take it as a sign that Henry wanted to pass. At the time that seemed to me a reasonable conclusion. However, now that Henry had told me that he was a Jew I couldn’t imagine that in similar circumstances he would be less forthright with Archie. Didn’t that blow out of the water the theory that he was trying to pass? It did occur to me that Henry had created the occasion for this particular confession. Looked at in a certain way, it was a piece of stagecraft. He had certainly avoided saying that he was Jewish when Archie grilled him about his background that day we met. He had stopped short of a lie, but what had his intention been?

  The only Jew I had known for a long time and thought I knew well was our dentist in Pittsfield, a nice man who had been taking care of my teeth since my first cavity and who had never hurt or scared me. He had a big, richly stocked aquarium in his office, so cleverly placed that you could watch the fish while he drilled, and I think that at one point I was so interested in them that I looked forward to my appointments. I was very much aware of the Jewish family that owned the big Pittsfield department store. Two of the grandchildren, both a couple of grades behind me, had gone to the same country day school as I in Lenox. My parents didn’t know their parents or grandparents, probably because they didn’t belong to the country club. But even if they had belonged, my mother and father w
ould have kept a respectful distance from them, as they normally would in the case of a much richer or grander member of the club with whom they didn’t have a personal connection. It would have been up to the Kaufmanns to make the first move. There were Jewish musicians in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which performed in the summer at Tanglewood, but I had not had an opportunity to meet any of them. We had no Jewish neighbors. To my knowledge, there weren’t any Jews working at the bank. The position of Jews at my boarding school was, by contrast, well established. There were several New York Jews—elegant and rich—among the students, the most notable being the sons of a family of bankers. Members of that family had been coming to the school since the 1920s, and both the infirmary and the science building bore the family name. As it happened, there was no von Stein in my form, which was probably the reason that out of my form I alone made it to Harvard. According to school legend, every von Stein had a guaranteed berth.

  For more than a year, the core of my general information about Jews and their problems had come from the film Gentleman’s Agreement. My mother, who never missed a movie with Gregory Peck, took me to see it in Pittsfield during a school break. My father never went. The next day I borrowed from Womrath’s the novel on which the movie was based. The way Jews were treated, the cowardice of practically everyone whom the Gregory Peck character confronted once he began telling people that he was a Jew, it all disgusted me. For reasons unrelated to Jews, I was envious of Gregory Peck, because his simple, affectionate, and courageous mother in the film was exactly the kind of mother I would have liked, and I was envious of his little son, because I wished I had a father like Gregory Peck. I asked my mother whether that was really how Jews were treated. She said she had no personal experience with Jews. Then, during the second semester of my last year at school, in the modern history course, we took up the Germans’ slaughter of Jews during the war. The history master, Mr. Ticknor, brought to the classroom a book of photographs taken by American soldiers who had liberated concentration camps, as well as photographs taken by German soldiers in the Warsaw Ghetto and elsewhere in Poland and Russia. This can’t have been the first inkling I had of these matters. But what I had read in magazines, or heard in snatches of conversations, apparently had not sunk in. After Mr. Ticknor’s course I had to agree with him that mistreatment of American Jews by Americans was a disgrace. As he saw it, Germans had been able to set about exterminating Jews in Europe only because neither they nor the local populations thought Jews were human. It followed that we all had to fight against anti-Semitism. On an impulse unusual in our relations, during a weekend I was spending at home I told my parents about Mr. Ticknor and his views. It was before the Easter vacation, and therefore before my interview with Mr. Hibble. They didn’t say Mr. Ticknor was wrong. I wasn’t even sure that they were paying attention. However, on my next visit, while my father and I were driving to the club, he observed apropos of nothing that there was no way you could make people love one another. Many people plain didn’t like Jews and didn’t want them around. Even if they were well behaved and respectable. The same went for Negroes and Catholics, especially Irish and Italian Catholics. For instance, Gummy—the nickname of the club’s president, Mr. Gifford Upton Morris—had sworn that he would never allow a Jew to set foot in the club. Of course, no Jew worthy of being invited to the club would want to offend by his presence the president and not a few of the members. For that matter, my father continued, he didn’t think a Jew could get a job at the bank or a management position at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, and certainly not at the big paper mill in Dalton. I asked whether he thought that was fair. He shrugged and pointed out that violence—Germans killing Jews or Southerners lynching Negroes—was one thing, but being allowed to choose with whom you played golf or worked was another. Besides, he added, there are lots of Jews who hire only Jews and prefer to do business with their own kind. In reply, I too shrugged. There was no use arguing with my parents about anything serious. Their minds were on other things. And much as I would have liked to tell him he was full of it, there was something to be said for his views, especially if the Jew was obnoxious. It seemed that many were. Henry was anything but. If I could get past the problem of whether I could in good conscience suggest that he visit me in Lenox when I knew that his presence wouldn’t be universally welcomed if the truth were revealed, and if I could be sure that my parents weren’t going to have a big row while he was there, it would be a fine project to bring him to the club and introduce him to Gummy. Henry didn’t play tennis, but he could hang around the pool, provided he had suitable swimming trunks. Someone at school had told me that Jews wore bathing suits that were like jockey shorts to show off their dicks and balls.