by Louis Begley
Most often, Clara spoke to me. Sometime after Christmas, she invited me to a record dance at Wellesley. She said she was used to being treated gently, and I was gentle. To jump ahead in time, in the spring of that year, Archie became the owner of a four-door black Nash, the most important feature of which was the fold-down front seat that made a fairly comfortable bed. I borrowed the Nash to take Clara to the Wellesley prom. We were leaving when she whispered that she wouldn’t have to sign in at her dormitory by midnight, as the rules required even on that very important occasion. She had told the housemother that she was staying over with a friend in Newton, and had produced the necessary letter from the friend’s parents confirming the invitation. We can be out as late as you like, she said. Then she stuck her tongue in my ear. We drove over to the lake and parked, and I put down the car seat. A little later, she wiggled out of her long strapless pink taffeta dress telling me that otherwise it would be ruined. Before dawn, overcoming my panic, she brought us to a simulacrum of mutual fulfillment. It was, she assured me, without damage to her hymen. That summer, she married the eldest son of a coffee-growing family whose plantation abutted the property of her parents. Through the university administration, she got hold of my home address and sent me an invitation to the wedding mass. Naturally, she did not return to Wellesley, and I was relieved of the need to face future relations.
THE TRANSFORMATION that Archie was undergoing during our freshman year didn’t involve only clothes. He wanted to live up to his Roman numeral, with all its connotations for a connoisseur of American society. Mrs. White was on the right track when she supposed that a young man called Archibald P. Palmer III was likely to have rich parents; both she and Henry showed an instinctive grasp of the lore of American old money. Had Mrs. White learned about the checks that Archie received—irregularly but sometimes in substantial amounts—she would have thought herself proved right. In fact, she was mistaken; the money wasn’t old, and its source wasn’t a family trust. According to Archie, it flowed from his mother’s various unglamorous little businesses, most recently the importation and resale of primitive art and antiquities. Nor was Archie related in any demonstrable way to the grand and wealthy Palmers of Chicago. His middle name was humble: Peters. However, he liked the impression produced by his surname and the enhancing Roman numeral and made no effort to dispel it. Faced with a question on the order of “Is Mrs. Potter Palmer your aunt or cousin?” Archie would laugh and say she was neither. No harm was done. People to whom such things mattered, even undergraduates, were too knowledgeable to take it for granted that someone called Morgan must be connected to the banking house, or that there is only one kind of Rockefeller.
At the same time, Archie did exert himself to make clear to undergraduates he considered useful that, although in a sense he came from nowhere, he should be regarded as their social equal. He simply acted on the English principle that a man may be born a gentleman and remain one even if his material circumstances are depressingly modest and he lacks powerful friends. The latter was certainly Archie’s case. Unlike the men he wanted to emulate, he had no friends at college with whom he had been to grammar and prep school, there had been no shared vacations in Northeast Harbor or Tucson, and no one knew his mother and father. From his point of view, that was an unfortunate consequence of his father’s army career, one that he could and must correct. Accordingly, he believed that as a matter of right he should be asked, at the beginning of our sophomore year, to join one of the final clubs whose quaint buildings on Mount Auburn Street and its vicinity he had inventoried. He wanted to wear a club tie—the right tie, not all clubs being equal. Among the rewards would be getting his name on the lists compiled by social secretaries, which assured one of invitations to coming-out parties, cotillions, and assemblies. Later, it would be entry into the old-boy network and first-class passage to posh Wall Street firms. Though a romantic, Archie was clear-eyed about practical matters: he didn’t shoot for the moon. There were two or three clubs that he realized were simply out of the question however hard he tried. They were also out of reach for all but a few whose fathers, grandfathers, and uncles hadn’t been members. The less grand but still respectable clubs, however, should not shun him. The trick was how to make that understood. The usual route, reminding relatives and upperclassmen with whom you had been at school that you were a freshman and implicitly available, was not open to him. No one outside the British Isles had heard of his boarding school in Scotland, and it probably wasn’t a household name even there. The military academy in Ohio to which he was sent after his father’s posting to the Canal Zone was also obscure. Archie had to fend for himself. Very astutely, he decided to make the most of two of his special skills. In Scotland, he had learned to play rugby—rather effectively, for someone of his slight build. Joining the rugby club, which existed at the fringe of university sports, threw him in with English and Canadian undergraduates and business school students, a number of whom were long on cosmopolitan polish and money. Archie’s other trump card was his near-native Spanish. He liked to use it and did well ferreting out events likely to be attended by Latin American students at the college and at neighboring institutions. In the 1950s, a Latino who had been sent to a New England college or, better yet, boarding school was bound to come from a rich and prominent family. Archie had, in fact, met Clara at a program devoted to Mayan art. But, as he gradually realized, the trouble with his amusing rugby players and Hispanics was that very few of them moved in the provincial society of college clubmen that was Archie’s goal, or indeed gave a fig about it.
A drinking song popular at the time proclaimed that it’s not for knowledge that we came to college but to have fun while we’re here. That summed it up for Archie, if you added useful friendships to fun. Little time or energy remained for course work. I thought that was a pity, because he was so very sharp—as quick, I sometimes thought, as Henry. But while Archie truly didn’t try or care, Henry’s preoccupation was to hide how hard he worked. Those not familiar with his habits were inclined to believe his standard explanation that everything was done at the last minute, in a burst of speed and nighttime cramming. That merely showed how he had adopted, along with all of Archie’s other lessons, the precept that there was nothing less charming than being known as a grind, a disgrace worse than all the detested sky-blue suits or tan flannel jackets in Brooklyn. In reality, Henry worked hard and steadily, but almost in secret and on subjects for which he had a passion. Archie had no such passions and had come to believe in light of Henry’s successes that one could get along very well doing virtually nothing.
How Jeanie was going to fare in his evolving new world was a question that troubled Archie. At first, he believed that she would do fine if she could acquire a certain veneer, by which he meant a repertory of tricks she could perform at his prompting or when her own sense of the circumstances moved her. One day, just before they disappeared into his bedroom, he said to Jeanie, Go ahead, do “Au clair de la lune.” She sang on command, in a pure and self-confident voice, enunciating very well, although she knew no French. When I expressed my admiration, he patted her on the rump and declared that in no time he would have her singing “Auprès de ma blonde” and “La vie en rose.” Indeed, one by one, he added to Jeanie’s curriculum several Piaf and Trenet hits. You can teach her anything, was his judgment.
In common with the rich Latinos, some of the rugby players had knowledge of several languages, experience of luxurious vacations spent in distant locations, and tales of adventures in legendary brothels. They also had startlingly large allowances, beyond anything I had imagined possible for students of their age. Archie’s charm and inventiveness when it came to having fun served him well. He became their mascot and part of a shifting group of debonair figures at after-game cocktail parties, dinners at the Chinese restaurant on Church Street or an Italian restaurant in North Boston, or at the Savoy, listening to Dixieland jazz. Jeanie was indeed a quick study. The men liked her: she was pretty and pleasant, and as s
he was sleeping with Archie, which defined her status, none of them would have wanted to treat her unkindly. Whether they made passes at her when Archie’s back was turned, and how she responded, were unexplored questions. However, her good nature turned out not to be enough. The contrast with the other girls was too great. It made trouble without a word being said, and perhaps some supercilious, wounding remarks were made. Like the men, these girls were rich, but, unlike them, they were snooty about it. In their company, Jeanie seemed like someone whose mother or grandmother could have been one of their grandmother’s Irish maids, probably of the more refined kind, who could be trusted with delicate washing and ironing. Such may indeed have been her lineage. But Jeanie had a lot of spunk. She didn’t like the position into which she had been thrust and made the break herself. Archie regretted the termination of their sessions in his bedroom. However, to his credit, he made no serious attempt to wheedle her into coming back.
I was a less frequent guest than Henry at parties given by Archie’s friends. If they were on a Friday, which was the norm, my Boston Symphony subscription was a cast-iron reason for not attending. Probably I would have stayed away in any event. The talk bored me. I hadn’t a doubt that it bored Henry too; however, Archie’s friends were a species he wanted to understand, just as he wanted to learn how to hold his liquor, smoke cigars, play poker and bridge, and acquire the other skills that Archie thought were required of a gentleman. But neither those pursuits, nor any of the other ways of wasting time that Henry discovered on his own, seemed to interfere with other, more arduous aspects of his self-transformation. Perhaps the two were more complementary than I understood.
Just before Christmas vacation, Henry told me that he would major in the classics. He gave his parents the news once he got home. The weeklong row that followed didn’t surprise him. They wanted him to plant his feet firmly in the American middle class. Becoming a doctor would assure that, but they were willing to settle for the law, since he absolutely refused to study medicine or even go through the motions of taking the required college biology and chemistry courses. His crazy idea of throwing away all his advantages, full college scholarship included, on the literature of two dead languages and a future limited by the meager salary he could expect from teaching—assuming a Jew could get a job teaching classics at a university—was a bad joke, an insult to them. I must admit that I too had been taken aback by his choice. He expected to excel in all circumstances, that much was clear, but if he made this choice he would be competing against undergraduates who had learned their Latin, and in many cases Greek as well, at boarding schools that took great pride in teaching those subjects. They had been taught in the same manner, and often by the same people, as members of Harvard’s classics department. I thought that the odds against Henry would be long. Don’t worry, he told me, my Latin is pretty good. I asked whether this was learning acquired at his Brooklyn high school. Not at all, he said, over there I was busy learning English. Then where? I asked. In Krakow, he answered impatiently, in Krakow. I shook my head and suggested he didn’t know what he was getting into. In reply he said that catching up would require little more than memorization. Besides he had good German, itself still useful for classicists. During the same conversation he mentioned having noticed that the grander Latinos had a way of switching from English to French instead of Spanish when they spoke to each other. Obviously, learning French well was also a sound investment. A fiercely accelerated French-language course was offered in the spring semester; Henry signed up.
One aspect of the row with his parents about Latin and Greek bothered Henry; he thought he had been unfair. They thought that concentrating in the classics would preclude his going to law school after college, and he had done nothing to set them straight. He waited until the last day of vacation to tell them how the system worked. I was paying them back, he said. Why couldn’t they leave me alone just once, or, even better, accept that this was a decision I should make? It would have been such a nice change! In return for the last-minute explanation, and a promise that he wasn’t burning his bridges and would keep an open mind about the law, he extracted a price: their agreement to send him to Grenoble for the summer. He had heard good things about the university’s French-language program.
In this and many other things he was way ahead of me. I hadn’t even begun to think of the summer.
V
HENRY MADE NO MOVE to take out the girls who came to parties given by Archie’s friends, although he got on with them just fine. He’d back one of them into a corner of a room packed with undergraduates in full cry to have what he called a quiet talk. Tête-à-tête he could be dazzling. He listened carefully to what was said to him or at least gave that impression. He was less good in groups, especially groups of men. His timidity was one reason—he compensated for it by what I called his Penthesilea-meets-son-of-Peleus preciousness—and his utter ignorance of sports was another. He had never been to a baseball game. Archie had dragged him to a couple of football games at Soldiers’ Field and tried to explain to him the basics. Henry could discourse on books with great brio, and that is what he presumably talked about with those girls. However, the girls who came to these parties, even if they liked books, intimidated him by their provocative, hard-edged manners and staccato wit, and by their trick of creating an illusion of physical intimacy, of almost being in your arms, an illusion they could dispel as quickly as it had been created. Instead, he had dates with Radcliffe girls Archie called Henry’s dogs: sincere and nice girls too fat or too skinny, with legs bowed or shaped like a Percheron’s. He made no mystery of why. You can ask them out at the last minute, he explained, you don’t have to huff and puff for the privilege of feeling them up, and the risk of rejection is minimal. It was all true, but I thought he was selling himself short. Although he certainly didn’t fit the Stover at Yale stereotype, he was handsome, and it wasn’t his conversation alone that made him fleetingly attractive to the girls at parties given by Archie’s friends. I preached the lesson of self-confidence to Henry over and over. He would hear me out very politely. Once, exasperated, I asked whether this was another manifestation of the Jewish problem and, if it was, did he tell the dogs that he was a Jew. Cool as a cucumber, he replied that of course it was, it was all about being Jewish. As to what he told the dogs, he said there was no general rule: it depended on what he was doing with them. I was puzzled. This seemed a departure from his policy neither to deny Jewism nor proclaim it unbidden. Did he kiss or fondle them without saying that he was a Jew, but inform them if something more was in the offing? I said to myself that he surely told them, and right away was shocked by my own attitude. Did it imply that being Jewish was like having untreated gonorrhea?
Sometime before Thanksgiving Henry told me he thought he had found Penthesilea in his humanities course. The cavernous space of Sanders barely held the crowd drawn by lectures of the visiting professor, a well-known and controversial litterateur. So far, Henry had studied the girl only from a distance, but, if it was indeed Penthesilea, he knew her more prosaic name: Margot Hornung. Another girl called Sue, next to whom he usually sat, had told him all about her. They had attended the same girls’ school in the city. Henry thought Sue liked him. Yes, she’s a dog, he admitted. Sue and he talked before and after class, passed notes to each other, and went for tea and English muffins at Hayes-Bickford. He had never met a bigger gossip. I was curious to hear the tales she told, but Henry said there wasn’t any point until I had confirmed the identification. He proposed that I come to Sanders for that purpose the next day. It was a silly idea: we had each had the same opportunity to study her looks. Finally, I gave in, in part because I was curious about the visiting professor. We got to Sanders early, and there were still some empty seats up front, but Henry pulled me along to one of the back rows. When I protested, he said that I’d be able to hear perfectly well. Anyway, that was where Sue sat, and she was saving our places. She turned out to be a pleasant-looking blond who showed braces over tiny yellow teet
h when she smiled. Henry sat down between us. The hall was filling up, and I had begun to wonder whether the girl would appear, when Henry poked me and pointed to the door nearest the podium. There she is, he whispered. There was no question about it; it was Penthesilea of green stockings, now in navy-blue socks and penny loafers. I gave him the thumbs-up sign.
