Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  Really, the headmistress said again. And where did you go after you left Poland?

  We came here, Henry answered.

  Where is here? she pursued. Not the Berkshires, I imagine.

  Oh no, we went to New York.

  When you say we, do you mean you and your family?

  Henry nodded. Yes, my parents and I. I’m an only child.

  And you prepared for college in New York?

  Yes, said Henry. And before that, for one year I attended a Polish secondary school in Krakow. That was right after the war.

  The headmistress became very pensive and said she supposed that the high school in New York was St. Ignatius Loyola, well known for its high standards. She had seen the rector in October, at a philological society meeting.

  No, no, replied Henry, and named his high school.

  How extraordinary! the headmistress exclaimed. I’ve never heard of it. Hasn’t May told me that you and George are classmates? Is it possible that you went to Harvard College directly from there?

  And on a full scholarship, Cousin Ellen, interjected George.

  To my surprise, Margot gave him an unequivocally dirty look. Perhaps she thought that he was patronizing Henry. I doubted that George noticed, the response of Cousin Ellen being so striking that it must have diverted attention from Margot. That formidable lady stretched out her hand over the table, patted, and then squeezed Henry’s hand, and said that she was going to tell May Standish how especially grateful she was for having been given the opportunity to meet such a remarkable young man. Would he come to dinner at her and Susie’s house in Boston? she asked. Oh yes, she added, of course I will want you to bring this lovely young woman, your charming roommate, and dear George.

  There was a large handbag on the floor next to her chair. She brought it onto her lap and, having extracted a notepad and a fat fountain pen, asked Henry to write his name, address, and telephone number, and Margot’s too. After he had handed the pad back to her, she examined it, and with an air of puzzlement read aloud: Henry White. Henry White.

  How odd, she said at last, I wouldn’t have thought that White was a Polish surname.

  It isn’t. My parents changed our name when we arrived here. It had been Weiss. The name isn’t necessarily Jewish, but in this case it was.

  Remembering how Archie had been obliged to pull this information out of him, I was astonished. The setting then had been in a sense private: three roommates chatting as they walked through the Yard on the way to dinner. Here, Henry could be justified in thinking that he was on public display, and in enemy territory. Dragged along behind a victor’s chariot, was the way he might have put it. Had he gotten into the habit of revealing himself? I doubted it; in fact, I wondered whether he had ever told Margot or George what his name had been. I couldn’t be sure about Margot, but George would never have asked, and I didn’t believe Henry would have volunteered. It occurred to me that if Henry had not said anything to those two, that might be a strong reason to get the disclosures over with quickly, the headmistress being most unlikely to relent until her questions had been answered. He was killing two birds with one stone: forestalling the continuation of questions that I was sure humiliated him and clearing up an ambiguity in his relations with Margot and George.

  You poor boy, said the headmistress, once again reaching for his hand. You and your parents must have suffered greatly. Were you in a concentration camp?

  Henry told her that they hadn’t been. We all saw that he wanted to leave it at that, but the headmistress’s long habit of sounding the depths of her girls’ souls prevailed over her sympathy—sympathy vivid enough to require her to dab at her eyes with a little handkerchief. She went on prodding him, very gently to be sure, and at last I heard Henry speak of the grubby indignities endured during the years at Pani Maria’s, which he had told me so firmly he wouldn’t discuss. He showed no emotion. At first I admired his composure, which in a way seemed well suited to the comfortable room and the refinement of the lunch table. Then I saw that it wasn’t composure at all. He was absent. He talked as if in a trance, not entirely aware of those around him or his own presence in their midst. Perhaps he had learned to abstract himself from his own past. Perhaps the faculty through which we feel outrage and self-pity had been cauterized in him.

  When the story had been told, Susie asked Henry whether he had read John Hersey’s new novel, The Wall.

  What is it about, Cousin Susie? interrupted George.

  She said it was about the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Jewish uprising. What the Germans did to the Jews: a dreadful, almost unbelievable story but entirely true.

  My mother has given it to me, he replied. I haven’t read it yet, but I intend to.

  You’ll love it, Susie assured him. Mr. Weeks gave it the most brilliant review in the Atlantic. I would so much like to know what you think.

  Henry smiled and said nothing.

  Under the butler’s supervision, the waitresses were passing green and gold demitasses of coffee in the adjoining room. As we were rising from the table, the headmistress said that the story Henry had told was of the highest importance. Would he be willing to tell it again, she asked, at her and Susie’s home, to a small gathering of friends, some of whom would be her colleagues? This was not to be in place of the much more jolly dinner to which she hoped he would come with his young friends; indeed the many dinners she hoped they would have together.

  Henry shook his head. I told it to you because you made me feel that you really wanted to know, and that you really wanted to understand an experience that I’m no longer sure I understand. That was an exception. I really don’t want to talk about the war to a group after dinner.

  She didn’t seem offended.

  Almost at once, Margot declared she had a headache and went to her room. I thought I’d go home, but George suggested that Henry and I take turns at Ping-Pong against him. I agreed, and saw that Margot was right: had I been Henry, I wouldn’t have kept coming for more. But I wasn’t him. The implications of that simple fact were too numerous; I felt crowded by them. After a few games, I did capitulate. Paddle in hand, George was an insufferable bully. Since Mrs. Standish had also gone upstairs, I asked him to thank his mother for me and say that I would write from Cambridge.

  Henry caught up with me at the door.

  You know, he told me, I really don’t like people who ask personal questions. Aren’t they willing to figure out anything for themselves?

  They’re nice ladies, I replied, though pretty tough sledding. They didn’t mean any harm. They’ve just never met anyone like you. They think you’re great.

  He mulled that over, and said, Yes, they’re nice ladies. Then he added, I didn’t know you were so thick with all these people, the rich gentry. You know every one of them, and they all know you!

  These are small New England towns, I told him. Full of small-time scandal and curiosity. Summer people come and go, but the locals all know one another. That’s all it is.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Henry and Margot took the train back to New York, and the day after, before dawn, George and I went up to Stowe. We planned to ski and get back in the evening. Driving three hours over those icy roads twice in one day was a crazy thing to do, but by nine-thirty we were on the slopes. Except for the bitter cold, the conditions were perfect, and, by the time we finished, we were exhausted and also famished. From a grocery store still open we bought a loaf of Wonder Bread, a jar of peanut butter, grape jelly, and a quart of milk. I made sandwiches, and we passed the milk bottle back and forth while George drove. This being his father’s new car, he was reluctant to let me take the wheel. I was about to doze off when George began to speak about Henry and Margot’s visit.

  She’s a hard nut to crack. I think I’ve really gummed it up with her. Did you notice how she’d hardly talk to me at lunch?

  I said I had. She had seemed gloomy.

  You mean pissed off!

  Should she be?

  I don’
t know. We’ve been necking, but it’s never gone far. After the dance, when everyone had gone to bed, I decided I’d make my move. I guess it wasn’t appreciated.

  I made no comment.

  She’s sexy as hell, and she isn’t exactly the Virgin Mary. She talks a great game, but when it comes down to it, you’d swear nobody had ever touched her. It’s true. I kind of forced the issue, and that really pissed her off.

  I asked what he was going to do about it.

  You tell me. When I said let’s get together as soon as we get back to Cambridge, she said she wouldn’t have time. Full stop. I think I’ll ask Henry to talk to her. She really likes him, and he’s a really good guy. You saw how he made a hit with the parents and with those two old birds? They’ve never said more than two words to me before. I’m glad I invited him. Mother said I should get him to come back in the summer.

  We drove in silence for a while and then he said, Do you know what Bunny Rollins told me about her? I wasn’t going to repeat it, but I’m pissed too. According to Bunny, Margot is the only girl in her class who has a diaphragm. Now I ask you, why does she have it if she doesn’t want to get laid?

  Bunny Rollins was a girl from Tyringham with quite a reputation for round heels herself.

  How does Bunny know? I asked.

  Damned if I know, he replied. That sort of thing gets around.

  IX

  I GOT BACK TO CAMBRIDGE late in the afternoon on the day before the start of the reading period. George and his mother gave me a ride, and May invited both of us to dinner at her club in the Back Bay where she was staying. We were to be there at seven. In the meantime, I went to the dormitory to drop off my bag and freshen up. I saw no sign of Archie’s or Henry’s having returned. The telephone rang as I was leaving. The caller introduced himself as Colonel Palmer. We had never spoken before; my previous conversations had been with Mrs. Palmer. The colonel said he had distressing news: Archie had been in a car accident on Christmas Day. His leg was in a full-length cast. The doctors thought that in a week or ten days he would be able to take the plane to New York and from there another one to Boston, but the cast wouldn’t come off for some weeks after that. Archie would need a wheelchair at the airport and certainly wouldn’t be able to cope with his luggage. Would Henry or I meet him? I explained that Henry was still away and assured the colonel that one or both of us would be there. Splendid, he said, in that case he or Mrs. Palmer would be in touch again, as soon as the travel plans had been finalized. I asked whether I could say hello to Archie. Not this afternoon, replied the colonel. He is full of painkillers and in and out of sleep.

  As it turned out, I went alone to pick up Archie at Logan. Henry had a class that met during the reading period which he couldn’t miss. Neither my first phone conversation with the colonel, nor the second when he called with the flight information, nor even the one with Archie when at last I got him on the telephone had prepared me for how badly banged up he was.

  You’re a real mess, I said to him, once I had collected his luggage with the stewardess’s help and we were propelling him in his wheelchair toward the taxi line.

  He said it could have been much worse. The broken nose, entirely taped over, and the cuts on his forehead and left cheek were from having been thrown against the windshield. How the leg had gotten broken in two places was a mystery. He didn’t know, having passed out cold.

  A fuller description of the crash came during the ride to Cambridge. He had stayed late at a reception at the officers’ club on the base, talking to a second lieutenant’s wife whom he described as a bit of all right, and afterward drove his mother’s Simca to a party given by locals at a hacienda some thirty miles away over a straight and reasonably well-paved highway. It was a moonless night, with the sky full of stars, and he was having fun. The Simca was a piece of junk, and he floored the gas pedal to see how fast she would go. In fact, it held the road better than he had expected, and the speedometer went up to one fifty. Kilometers, of course, he explained. Everything was fine, he was tooling along pleasantly, when a pickup truck full of peons pulled in from a feeder road. They had no business there; he was on the main road and had the right-of-way. In fact, he didn’t even realize that they were there before he had rammed them. Later he found out that the hombre riding in the passenger seat of the cab was dead and another, who had been thrown from the truck bed, wasn’t going to make it. The rest were no worse off than he. Someone in a car that stopped to look at the wreck noticed his mother’s Canal Zone license plates and when he got to a phone called the base so that the MPs got there first, ahead of the local gendarmes.

  That was pure luck, he added. I was taken right away to the American hospital, and we didn’t have to deal with the natives. That is something you definitely want to avoid. Not that anyone could have tried to make me walk a straight line with my leg looking like a corkscrew! I don’t know whether anyone cared about my breath, but I had the brains to gargle before I left the club. One good thing is that Father now wants Mither to get a real car to replace the Simca. The other good news is that she has decided to give me wheels of my own, as soon as I get rid of this—he tapped his cast—and finish rehabilitation.

  The wheels turned out to be the Nash in which I would take Clara to her prom.

  Archie told me about another pleasant change in the Palmer family’s circumstances. For years, his maternal grandfather had bought oil and gas rights in the Texas Panhandle. Few people paid much attention to these properties, but it was the old boy’s custom to make investments—small bets on real long shots. When he died, Archie’s mother, being the only child, inherited them. Now on one location a wildcatter working in partnership with his mother had hit a gusher. A couple of other sites seemed promising as well. More gas than oil, he added, and not enough to make them rich, though it would make it easier for his father to retire.

  Several days passed before I had a chance to ask Henry about his impressions of the Berkshires and the Standishes, and the other autochthons he had observed. He was very pleased and made no attempt to appear nonchalant. When he said he wished he had been able to meet my parents, I told him that they had particularly asked me to bring him over to the house for lunch, but the Standishes’ lunch had made that impossible. In reality, I had made an alternate plan to invite him to tea on New Year’s Day, but thought that I should hold off until I had returned home from the Standishes’ and checked my parents’ condition. My prudence proved justified. They were too sick to make it downstairs, let alone receive a guest. I made a pot of coffee, carried it upstairs, and put it outside their bedroom door. At about six, I scrambled some eggs and ate them at the kitchen table. The Asphalt Jungle was playing in Great Barrington. For a change, I took my father’s Oldsmobile instead of my mother’s Chevy and went to see it.

  We talked afterward about George and the day’s skiing at Stowe, and I asked whether he understood what was eating him and Margot. Henry hesitated before admitting that he did. I believe that he would have preferred to hold his tongue. We had, however, by then gotten into a habit of speaking to each other frankly, without sufficient regard for discretion.

  It’s an odd business, he told me, and you mustn’t ever repeat what I’ll tell you.

  I laughed, because the warning that whatever he was telling me in confidence must remain between us was the invariable preface to such disclosures, and I regularly teased him about it.

  All right, he said, this time I’m serious. Margot and I went for a walk up the road from the Standishes’ toward Monument Mountain. This was before the New Year’s Day lunch. After a while, she took my arm and said she wanted to speak to me about something rotten that had happened to her. Here is the story: When they got back to the house after the dance, and everybody was milling about saying goodnight, George asked whether he could come to her room after everybody had gone to bed. She said that was all right, but he couldn’t stay long. They had been making out in Cambridge, of course, mostly when he walked her home in the evening, but the
y’d never gone very far. So she waited for him, reading in bed, in her pajamas. She would have stayed in her party dress if it hadn’t been so uncomfortable, and anyway she hadn’t taken off her bra or her panties. Just between you and me, I’m sure she thought that was more sexy and she wasn’t opposed to some heavy necking. Anyway, about half an hour later, George tiptoes in and they go through their usual routine, or a little more, only this time George doesn’t want to stop; he says they have to go all the way. She said no, they argued a little; she let him do something that wasn’t part of the routine; at some point she thought the pressure was off because he got all subdued, as though he’d lost interest. Anyway, he kissed her once more very nicely and left. She took off her underclothes, got back into bed, and was out like a light. Probably it was the champagne at the club and the nightcap back at the house. Anyway she woke up to find George wasn’t just in her bed. He was inside her. She didn’t scream or anything; she let him finish. She’d just had her period, so no problem there. When he started to tell her how he loved her and how happy she had made him, she told him he was a shit and they were through. She wasn’t going to tell Mrs. Standish or go home by the first train, but she warned him he had better stay away from her.

  George picked a great way to start the year, I said.

  Henry nodded. So the following night—that’s the night before Margot and I left for New York—the whole house went to bed early. Everybody was bushed. I don’t know whether you have been upstairs at the Standishes’. The parents’ bedroom, the children’s bedrooms, and the best guest room, where Margot was, are on the second floor, on two sides of a wide corridor that is more like a hall. The smaller guest rooms are one flight up. They put me in one of the guest rooms on the third floor. It was cold up there, much colder than the rest of the house, but I had three blankets and was very snug. Sometime in the middle of the night I realized that my door was being opened. Guess what—it was Margot. She said, It’s me, will you let me stay with you? Before I had a chance to answer, she slipped in under the covers and put her arms around me. I can’t sleep, she said, I’m too afraid that he is going to try something again. My heart was beating like crazy. She was wearing a nightgown and I could feel that she had nothing under it. She said her feet were blocks of ice, and she warmed them on top of mine. But when I tried to touch her, she said, Please, please don’t, it can’t be like that, I want you to be my brother. I asked her, Don’t you know I love you? She told me that was silly, because I didn’t understand anything about her, and if I did I wouldn’t feel that way. Please, let’s sleep, she said finally. I’ll be gone before daylight. She turned on her side and asked me to put my arms around her. We stayed like that until she left. She did sleep; I don’t think I slept at all.