Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  For some reason the reference to the Christmas events led Henry to ask how the colonel was adjusting—that is, I believe, the way he put it—to his duties in Korea.

  He hates the place, said Mrs. Palmer, who wouldn’t? But he has his command, and that’s what matters to him.

  Good for Pater, Archie exclaimed. Doesn’t that mean he’ll get his star?

  They had better give it to him, Mrs. Palmer replied. They’ve made a fool of him long enough.

  Colonel Palmer’s regiment was to suffer atrocious losses some weeks later, and the colonel himself was wounded. The promotion did come through, however, after he had been discharged from a stateside hospital and reassigned to Fort Benning. Military etiquette, or perhaps something more specific, compelled him to serve out a year in that post before retiring with his new rank. There was no need to hurry, as it turned out; the quantity of shrapnel that the surgeons were obliged to leave in his right leg made it quite impossible to play golf with the assiduity he had anticipated.

  Clearly, Archie had not known that his father’s dream of commanding a regiment in combat had just come true. I supposed that, even without Henry’s polite inquiry, Mrs. Palmer would have eventually told him before she left Cambridge. But momentarily her not having said anything sooner—for instance while they were putting the Nash through its paces but before they hit ninety-five mph—took me aback. When I thought about it later I understood that it was the result of her single-minded concentration on Archie, in its way perhaps as obsessive as Mrs. White’s on Henry, although it manifested itself differently in most respects. Mrs. White was certainly interested in how Henry spent his time and with whom. She was downright nosy. I couldn’t detect in Mrs. Palmer any curiosity about Henry or me or any of the other friends who took up so much of Archie’s time; certainly none was revealed during the couple of hours she spent in our living room. She did, on the other hand, ask to see his martini shaker and tumblers—which he hadn’t taken out, as they were, in his opinion, not right for the bourbon on the rocks we were drinking—and his cigarette case. Perhaps she feared that he had hocked them, I thought at first, but it became clear when they were produced that she wanted to touch them because they were love offerings, tangible signs of her tenderness. Given her miserliness, about which Archie couldn’t stop talking, the emotional cost of those expensive objects must have been painfully high. Perhaps it made other forms of involvement with her son less urgent.

  A NUMBER OF THINGS did not go well for Henry at the end of the spring semester. He took the rejection by the house hard, much harder than Archie, in part because he was convinced that Archie would have been admitted had he applied alone. I’m the Jewish monkey on his back, he said. I was convinced that the master’s class snobbery was more virulent than his anti-Semitism, but I didn’t say so to Henry. I believed that he’d rather be turned down as a Jew. Archie claimed that he couldn’t care less; the rooms at the Mount Auburn Street hall were larger and more agreeable than anything they could have gotten in the river house. Henry agreed but said that for the first time since having come to the United States he had been treated unfairly and had been left behind undeservedly.

  Also, Henry was beginning to think that people he was drawn to—Archie and I, George and Margot, and a few others excepted—didn’t like him. The classics and other literature courses he was taking were full of preppies. He had assumed that shared academic interests would lead naturally to friendships, but nothing of the sort happened. I’m not one of them, he told me; they make it very clear. People taking the same course as he, whom he knew by name, would among themselves say, Let’s go for coffee. But the invitation never seemed to extend to him—or if it did it was without the clarity he thought he would have needed in order to accept comfortably. No one knocked on his door on the way to the movies, and no one tried to catch his eye as he looked for a table at which to sit down when he came to lunch or dinner at the Union. He had his meals with Archie or me or else alone, wherever a vacant seat could be found. In the way his instructors treated him when he approached the podium after class, there was none of the ease and cheerful give-and-take that other bright undergraduates of his caliber enjoyed. I wasn’t surprised. His instructors were, to a man, old preppies or wished they had been and were attracted instinctively, no less than Henry, to the style of their preppy students, only in Henry’s case without reciprocal feelings. If Henry had listened to his parents and taken premed courses, he would have been one more eager beaver surrounded by others, all just as brainy as he and no more socially acceptable. They would have liked him because he worked hard and was a nice guy. As for being friends with professors, it was a safe bet that no one expected or wanted to have a personal relationship with his organic or inorganic chemistry instructor.

  Most painful was the change in his relationship with Margot. Ever since the evening on which they had gone to listen to Mabel Mercer, she had been letting him kiss her and fondle her breasts. He told me that he had made no attempt to do more. I want her to trust me, he said, I don’t want her to think that I am forcing her hand. The way we are now is better than anything I had expected, and I am still her best friend. If it was true what Bunny Rollins had told George about Margot, and George in turn related to me during our drive home from Stowe, perhaps Henry was wrong. Margot might have wished him to be more enterprising. I decided against telling him that. His feelings were too intense, and the risk too great of his turning on me if he thought that I lacked respect for Margot. At some point, perhaps in early April, Henry told me that Margot had put a stop to any physical contact between them; she had become too involved with someone else. Someone else turned out to be Etienne van Damme, the Belgian business school student. According to Henry, she had all but told him that she and the Belgian were having a real affair, conducted principally in New York, where van Damme would stay in a fancy hotel, and, when he or she had too much work to dash off to New York for the weekend, across the river, at his business school dormitory or at the Ritz in Boston. Henry claimed that he wasn’t jealous; she was still his long-term project and he had implicitly recognized that he would have successful rivals. He wondered, though, what had happened to their friendship. The Belgian had become her only topic of conversation.

  Suddenly, the spring reading period was upon us. Right after exams, Henry was leaving for Grenoble and the French-language summer program. To Archie’s astonishment and mine, he mentioned casually that Margot would be staying at a big property the van Damme parents owned in the Ardennes, and that she and Etienne had invited him to spend a week with them. Archie planned to divide his summer between a coffee plantation in Brazil, in the state of São Paulo, and a couple of haciendas in Argentina, visiting rugby friends. George and I had decided to drive out west and then return to the Berkshires via the Southwest and South.

  XII

  WE MADE A SHORT FORAY into Baja California and would have liked to continue there, but time was growing short. After two days, one spent at the beach, we began to make our way home following a route that took us through Arizona and New Mexico to Houston. Our next stop was to be New Orleans, where a certain Walter Trowbridge, who had been at school with George’s father, maintained an apartment on Toulouse Street in the French Quarter for the use of guests, most of them fellow oilmen. May and Cousin Jack had stayed there, and May described it as sinfully luxurious. August not being a month when the apartment was in demand, it was offered to us for as long as we liked. Urged by May, we signed up for five days, thinking we would use it for exploring the Quarter, the Garden District, and the bayou country. We were also tempted by the Mississippi delta, if a boat trip could be arranged. By the time we were leaving Houston, we felt we urgently needed to be pampered. The heat had been brutal, and ever since we had stopped camping we had shared rooms in very modest motels and hostels, most recently in the Houston YMCA. George had in his possession a lordly letter of credit issued by the Morgan Bank, and I had a suitable amount in traveler’s checks I had bought with the sum
advanced by Mr. Hibble. We could have afforded better accommodations. The Standish code of conduct, however, called for young men to travel on the cheap. I wanted to be as good a Standish as George at least in this respect, and the idea of transgressing against the code didn’t cross his mind. The code did permit occasional intentionally extravagant gestures, if they were justified by the occasion. We had read Frances Parkinson Keyes’s novel, Dinner at Antoine’s, and perused the section on New Orleans in our guidebook. It seemed clear that the fabled pleasures of New Orleans were justification enough. We would dine at Antoine’s and Brennan’s and visit the best jazz joints on Bourbon Street.

  We had passed Shreveport when George advanced another idea. Once we got settled in Toulouse Street—which was just an apartment with a cleaning lady who came in during the day but no concierge or anyone like that to watch our comings and goings—we would pick up a couple of girls and bring them home. Not the first night, but perhaps after the dinner at Antoine’s. The prospect filled me with disquiet, but I thought I had better be a good sport about it.

  The apartment was reached from a cobbled courtyard along the walls of which various potted tropical plants were disposed in great profusion. May had not exaggerated. Everything in the apartment was huge and agreeable: the four-poster beds, the oversize bathtubs, the soft leather sofas and armchairs in the living room. Next to the telephone directory we found a volume bound in leather entitled Information for Use of Toulouse Street Guests. George went through it quickly in the hope that it would contain a hint about where to look for girls. Either there wasn’t one or the reference to that activity was phrased too subtly. He learned, however, that in order to get a good table and be treated right at Antoine’s one should ask to speak to Michel, a waiter mysteriously attached to the person of Mr. Trowbridge. George called at once and made a reservation for the following evening. We spent most of the day brushing off mosquitoes aboard a boat that toured the bayous and were late getting to Antoine’s. It didn’t seem to matter. Michel greeted us like celebrities traveling incognito but known to him, and we ate our way through crayfish, Gulf fish, and shrimp. When George called for the check it turned out that we were Mr. Trowbridge’s guests. He had also left strict instructions to have us taste the Cognac kept in his private locker. We did more than taste. The snifters were very large, and Michel filled them generously.

  Henry must be at the van Damme château by now, said George.

  I said that was right. The course at Grenoble ended in early August. I suppose it’s pretty fancy, George observed. The parents say that no one eats like the Belgians. All the same, I’d be surprised if he was eating any better than this.

  I nodded, thinking I had just eaten the best meal of my life.

  I still can’t get over Margot, he continued. Why is she sleeping with that Belgian? What has he got over me? Or over Henry? Or you? Why did she make such a fuss just because I got a little pushy? Lord knows she had asked for it.

  I said I wasn’t a contender and speculated that van Damme had snowed her. He is older, drives a fast car, and has that family château up his sleeve.

  We drank the last of the Cognac and went out into the night.

  There were approved Bourbon Street addresses in Mr. Trowbridge’s book. We tried them all. In truth, the music was no better than what one could hear most nights on Tremont Street in Boston, perhaps not as good. We’d have a weak Scotch and soda and move on.

  I’m sick of these joints, said George.

  I said, Amen! Let’s go home.

  George shook his head. Thinking about Margot had made him horny. We’ve got to find some action.

  The question was where. According to the conception I had of such things, garishly dressed women should have been leaning against lampposts or sauntering down the street, swinging large handbags. They should have been sidling up to us and asking in their dripping southern drawl, Hey honey, lookin’ for company? But no streetwalker or pimp, white or black, approached us. In fact, there was no one in the streets other than loud groups of men milling outside bars, couples strolling arm in arm or holding hands, and solitary figures hurrying somewhere. Accountants, I thought, going home after a long day.

  I told George that in New Orleans people probably went to brothels. You had to know the address of the house and, since we didn’t, we might as well give up. We were wasting our time. George disagreed. He thought we had to check out the seedier bars that hadn’t made it onto Mr. Trowbridge’s list. That’s where the broads would be. We went up and down Bourbon again and then started walking into bars on side streets. Finally, off Chartres Street, we came upon Sonny Boy, which seemed deserted except for some men who could have been garage mechanics grouped at the bar and two busty women with vacant faces sitting alone at a corner table in the back.

  George said, This is it.

  The table next to the women’s was empty. As we were sitting down, they made a show of staring at us and whispering to each other. George stared back and said hi. They didn’t seem to mind; in fact, they giggled. When the waiter came over, George told him Scotch and soda for us and for those ladies anything they like. They didn’t mind that either, and what they liked was rum and Coke. By the time the drinks had arrived, we had moved over to their table. I sat next to Jonelle; George was next to Debbie. They were hospital ward nurses at Tulane, on a two-day break between shifts. Jonelle was from Baton Rouge and Debbie from Lake Charles. They had met in nursing school and were roommates at the hospital dormitory.

  Are boys allowed in your dorm? asked George.

  Now don’t get fresh, Debbie told him.

  George amazed me by lying. He explained that we had just graduated from Harvard and were working in New York, on Wall Street. We were in New Orleans on a little vacation. A friend had lent us his apartment in the Quarter and said we could invite girls—nice girls like them.

  Outbursts of Isn’t he fresh? followed, and we had another round. I knew that I had passed my limit, but I didn’t want George to think I was a wet blanket. Besides, the whiskey was helping me deal with a new sensation. Jonelle had put her plump forearm over mine and said, Hey, pleased to meet you. I was going to hold her hand as a gesture of appreciation, but it was no longer there. It had slipped off the table onto my lap where it busied itself. At the same time she was talking a blue streak into my ear, which apparently made it necessary to press her breast against my arm. I limited myself to neutral rejoinders such as You’re right, or Isn’t that amazing. The truth was that I didn’t understand most of what she was saying. George meanwhile had finished describing our apartment and said it was about time all four of us got going.

  Going where? asked Debbie.

  To Toulouse Street, George explained a little petulantly.

  You mean you want us to come to your place, asked Debbie. You crazy or something? We don’t know you guys. Did you hear that jerk, Jonelle?

  Yeah, I heard him, she replied. She didn’t take her hand away, but its activities ceased.

  Come on, said George. It won’t take any time to get to know us. We’re nice guys. We like girls like you.

  Oh yeah? Just because you’ve bought us a couple of lousy drinks? You’re real cheapskates. You could’ve asked us to dinner.

  Wait a minute, George replied, don’t be like that. It’s too late for dinner tonight. We’ll take you out tomorrow.

  Yeah, and what about tonight? We don’t even get a present?

  Sure you do, said George.

  I’m bushed, Jonelle interjected suddenly. I need to get back to the dorm.

  Come on, George said, you’ll get to sleep in at our place.

  Wait a minute! Let me just get this straight. You guys want to fuck? Jonelle asked, giving me a squeeze. It wasn’t clear whether the squeeze meant she was for it or against. What kind of gift you talking about?

  How about fifty, if you stay the night? George answered.

  Hey, said Debbie, you hear that? This guy thinks we’re cheap whores!

  Then she
got up on her feet and screamed: Did I hear that right? This creep thinks we’re whores! Joe, get over here and straighten him out.

  The bartender sauntered over, a crowbar in his right hand. The men at the bar didn’t move but stopped talking and were following the action.

  Get out, Joe said very calmly. Pay up and get out of here. I don’t want any college fuckups in my place.

  We both got up. George looked in his wallet, hesitated, and put a ten down, saying keep the change.

  It’s twice that, motherfucker.

  George threw down another bill.

  Get these guys out of here, said Debbie.

  We’re going, I told her, and stupidly added, Take care!

  We had just reached the door when George turned, faced the room, and at the top of his voice shouted, Fuck you, you redneck crackers!

  I grabbed him by the arm and shoved him out the door. We started in the direction of Toulouse Street, not as fast as I would have liked because the liquor had gone to his head. Every few steps he’d stop and say, I want to go back there and talk to them. I just don’t get it. What are they sore about?

  Nothing, I told him. Just keep walking.

  We had covered several blocks when presentiment or the sound of footsteps that weren’t ours caused me to look back. Three big guys in jeans and T-shirts were gaining on us. They were some of the guys who had been standing at the bar.