Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  We’ve got company, I told George, step on it. Maybe they had heard me. Right away there was a yell: Wait up. We want to talk to you.

  Don’t stop, I told George, and don’t turn around. It’s a delegation from the Sonny Boy.

  We might have tried to make a run for it, but a couple of others, just like the ones following us, appeared at the next intersection. They closed in on us. They had tattoos on their arms. I glanced down and saw that they were all wearing heavy army-surplus engineer’s boots. One of the men who had been following us pointed at George and said, That’s him.

  Hey you there, boy, said another one, giving George a shove in the chest, did I hear you say you want to fuck my sister? I think I’m going to beat your head in.

  Shit, Bill, give him a chance to say he’s sorry, said another one. Come on you son of a bitch, get on your knees and say you’re sorry.

  Yeah, on your knees and kiss my hand.

  George said, Look, we didn’t mean any harm. They’re nice girls. We were just kidding around. Anyway, I am sorry.

  Are you deaf, shithead? yelled the one called Bill. I told you to get down on your fucking knees and kiss my fucking hand.

  He followed up by hitting George in the mouth. George sat down on the sidewalk and didn’t move. The blow must have confused him.

  I had wrestled for my school, and had done well on the Harvard freshman team, where the coach had judo ranking and taught it to me and a couple of others informally, judo not being a varsity sport. I was only a little taller than George but a good bit heavier and not as drunk as he, though drunk enough, I suppose, to think I could take care of myself. I stepped in between George and the man called Bill, saying, Lay off, he had too much to drink but he didn’t mean any harm. Bill’s response was to swing at me. I ducked, and grabbing his arm threw him at the plate-glass storefront window. There was the sound of breaking glass, a moment of silence, and then Bill began to moan. I saw that his face was in shreds. According to the coach, in martial arts if you stand alone against several adversaries you get to take them on one by one. I didn’t expect that this was the custom in New Orleans. Looking down at the army engineer’s boots, I realized that I’d had it. Sure enough, almost at once, someone slugged me hard on the ear, and someone else rammed me in the stomach. I went down and was trying to curl up like a fetus and cover my face with my arms before they began to kick.

  There were dimly lit stations along the road of my return to consciousness. One was someone telling me to take it easy, I would be given something for the pain, another was a distant voice asking my name and the names of my parents and the president of the United States, and at last George’s voice telling me I was in recovery and not to worry. I tried to turn toward George, but I couldn’t and instead his face swam into my field of vision. For some reason it was hidden behind a thick textured veil. Then it was George’s voice again, telling me I had been moved into a regular room where I would stay until I was all better. I tried to say something but what came out of my mouth was a gurgle.

  You’ve got a tube up your nose, George told me. The doctor says you can speak with it, but it takes getting used to. Then he said, You saved my life, you big ape. You goddamn saved my life.

  I think I fell asleep almost immediately, but he was there when I woke up. It’s a private room, he explained, and he was going to be with me most of the time. Our mothers were on the way. At some point he told me about the beating. It was lucky you threw that guy into the store window, he said. When the glass broke an alarm went off at the precinct. It’s the sirens that made those guys stop, and then the cops were all over the place.

  Some days later, with my mother, Cousin May, and George present, the surgeon reviewed my condition. I had a broken nose that he had set and a broken jaw that he had wired. I had lost three front teeth. That was something the dentist could fix by giving me a bridge, and the nose and the jaw would be all right once the swelling went down and the hematomas had dissolved. Fortunately, a plastic surgeon happened to be on hand and worked on my face. That was the straightforward part of the job. The complicating factor had been serious internal bleeding. He removed my spleen as part of the repairs. All in all, he said I should consider myself lucky to be alive. The police and the ambulance got there in the nick of time. In due course, I would be almost as good as new. Hearing that, I asked whether I’d be able to go back to college in the fall. He tittered and said that patients must be patient; we’d discuss that when I was well enough to be released. Then, growing serious, he said that I shouldn’t count on being able to take the plane for Boston before at least two or three weeks. After that a surgeon there could look me over, and, if I felt up to it, I would be free to resume my studies.

  George remained with me in New Orleans until I was discharged and insisted on taking me home, over the objections of his mother and mine, each of whom thought it was her duty—duty that my new reputation for heroism had turned into something like privilege. As it turned out, George missed only some early crew practice; he was back in Cambridge in time for the start of classes. I was delayed by the need for a second surgical checkup at the hospital in Pittsfield. Finally, both my parents drove me down to Cambridge more than two weeks after registration, my father coming along in order to carry my meager possessions from the car to my suite. This shouldn’t have been too much to ask of him, especially as my suite was on the ground floor and could be reached directly from the street without passing through the porter’s lodge to get into the courtyard. Even so, the expedition was distasteful to my father. He didn’t like his work at the bank but hated taking days off even more and loathed anything that smacked of doing family chores. His mood lightened, however, when he saw George waiting on the sidewalk to help me move in. Here was further living proof of my new status. Knowing that both of my parents, for respective personal reasons, couldn’t wait to get back to Lenox, I begged them to leave at once. But George’s presence, though rendering my father’s presence superfluous, had awakened his sense of propriety and the regard due to the son of the head of the family, precluding my parents’ speedy exit. He insisted on taking us for a steak lunch at Cronin’s. Mother cut up my meat for me.

  Afterward, my mother and George made up my bed, a task that I realized I would have difficulty in performing in their absence. As soon as they left, I collapsed on it and slept until I heard voices in the living room. I rose to find Henry and Archie, Henry holding with both hands a large potted chrysanthemum.

  My mother’s idea, Henry explained, she called twice today to make sure I didn’t forget.

  When George appeared a while later, we all went into the dining room together and lingered at table, the conversation shifting between Archie’s tales of Carioca high life and polo ponies at the hacienda of Mario’s parents, and George’s description of our drive on Route 1 into Baja, which he considered the high point of our trip. I deflected all attempts to talk about the Sonny Boy and asked Henry, who had said nothing about his summer, whether Grenoble had lived up to expectations. Surpassed them, he said, best idea I ever had.

  He really wants you to ask him about Margot and Etienne, broke in Archie. George’s face turned somber. Although he claimed to have given up on Margot, Etienne had remained on his shit list.

  There isn’t much to say, Henry answered, he drives too fast over mountain roads and she claims not to be scared. Why she isn’t, I can’t figure out. Etienne took me to a town twenty kilometers away to buy a ribbon for my typewriter, and I came back sick to my stomach. And that’s never happened to me on shipboard during a storm. The property is magnificent and the parents are very civilized. But Etienne is like a wild man and I don’t understand it at all.

  We said goodbye at the steps leading to my entryway. George went back to his house. To my surprise, Henry didn’t follow Archie to their dormitory and asked whether he could come in for a moment.

  I had become used to the privileges conferred by reason of my infirmity and told him I was good at most for another fi
fteen minutes.

  Don’t worry, I’ll be out of here before then, he said. I just wanted to say very quickly how glad I am that you’re all right, and also something that you may perhaps find strange: I think that you’re especially lucky. I envy you.

  I said I assumed he meant I was lucky to be alive and not to have lost an eye or some other important organ.

  That too, he said, but I meant something else. You have actually been through it, the ultimate violation. You got the hell beaten out of you but now know that you can take it. You’ve survived and now you can go on with that knowledge. I can only wonder how I would have come out of it. I envy you.

  You’re nuts, I said. Do you also want to know what it’s like to be hit by a truck?

  No. He laughed. But you’re right. I am nuts.

  XIII

  AS GEORGE HAD BEEN DRIVING first through the empty spaces of the Midwest, there were long hours of silence in the car during which I reviewed the events of past months. One of my actions before the summer began troubled me: Wouldn’t it have been better—or anyway more elegant—to turn down the suite in the river house that had been offered and join Henry and Archie in their Mount Auburn Street exile? Wasn’t that what George Standish would have done in my place? To be sure, he had never uttered a word of reproach or criticism to me, although he knew the entire story, including my decision to live alone, which had coalesced about the time that applications to houses were made; from his silence I couldn’t necessarily infer approval. He had never told me that I had done the right thing. Certainly, our situations were very different. His father was an overseer of the university and had something to do with the investment of its endowment. Had George turned down the invitation to live in a house because he thought his roommates had been badly treated, someone would have made a fuss, and some dean or perhaps even the president would have had a word with the master. The master would think long and hard before pulling such a stunt again. It was also not out of the question that he would miraculously discover he had a place in the house for the slighted roommates after all. My own refusal to move into the house, on the other hand, would have been no more than a quixotic gesture to which no one in a position of power would have paid attention. There was another difference as well: my need to live alone, which I felt more acutely than ever, a need that was alien to George. Even if I had gone to Mount Auburn Street with Henry and Archie, it wouldn’t have been to share rooms with them again. I would have insisted on a single accommodation.

  All the same, I had resolved over the summer to be particularly attentive to my friendships with Henry and Archie, now that the intimacy of close quarters was ended. It seemed to me, for example, that I must call them as soon as I got to Cambridge and suggest that we go to the house dining room together, as opposed to meeting them there by chance. Knowing them, I was certain that they would feel like interlopers, even though, as affiliates of the house, they were supposed to take their meals there. The same would be true of the common room and the library. I was also worried about asking them over to my suite. There were no better rooms to be found in any of the houses, and I didn’t want to appear to flaunt my good fortune. And they might not think it was good fortune; they might suspect favoritism, the senior tutor pulling strings for someone called Standish. I needn’t have worried. Their unannounced visit took matters out of my hands.

  TOM PEABODY, the senior tutor, had advised me in my convalescence to sign up for no more than two courses instead of the usual load of four. He was right. Everything I undertook seemed to require twice the time I would have considered normal. Each weekly visit to the surgeon at Mass General consumed a whole morning. The Pittsfield dentist who had always cared for our family had equipped me with temporary front teeth of which I had to be very careful when I chewed. For the permanent work, he referred me to Dr. Fine, a colleague on Newberry Street in Boston, whose crack about giving me the best smile in the country club infuriated me. It didn’t help matters that the two bridges I needed required seven visits in the space of three weeks. The Novocain put me in a foul mood, as did the cost of the work, none of which was covered by the Harvard medical plan or, so far as I knew, the bank’s, but the latter point was moot since my father had canceled my insurance under the bank policy in favor of what the university offered. Perhaps there were cheaper dentists, but Dr. Jacobs had told me not even to think of economizing on those front teeth, and I did believe that he put my welfare ahead of the pleasure of directing the honorarium to his friend. I supposed that my parents would pay, if necessary, although a sum greater than the price of a new Buick was needed, but I had grown to prefer dealing with Mr. Hibble about money. He agreed at once to send the required sum. As we talked I learned that he had already covered whatever part Harvard wouldn’t of the cost of the surgeon and the hospital in New Orleans as well as my airfare. When I told him that I was sorry about these unexpected expenses, he made a ho! ho! ho! sound, and said that those were things for him to worry about. I began to wonder whether the trust wasn’t bigger than he had led me to believe. Another hypothesis was that he had been softened up by my defense of the Standish heir. Mr. Hibble’s mellowness notwithstanding, there was a change in my attitude toward money. When I still believed that my school bills and allowance were paid by my parents, I didn’t think about them, my principal concern being to escape as quickly as possible from the lecture that attended my every attempt to extract cash from my father. It never amounted to much anyway: I had no interest in ski boots or skis or in clothes of any sort. But, once I realized that there was a trust worth a fixed though unknown sum that was mine—or anyway reserved for my benefit—and that each outflow of cash and each investment loss diminished it, I became reluctant to spend money. It was my anchor to windward; I didn’t expect any other, my mother having drummed it into my head that when my father died there wouldn’t be anything left other than debts and the mortgage.

  TO HIS OWN SURPRISE, Archie was taken into a final club that was not at the very bottom of the social pecking order, and very quickly club activities—festive alumni dinners and bouts of drinking—absorbed most of his time. One of the oddities of his club was that no one seemed to know its members. In fact, at first I didn’t believe that a club so named existed. Only after Archie joined, and I learned to recognize the club tie, which he wore every day, did I realize that I could actually identify another member of the club in the house dining room. Perhaps on account of some past dark misdeed, perhaps simply because the members had no link to Boston society, having joined the club didn’t work all of the magic he had hoped for. Members were not invited to coming-out parties as a matter of course. You had to fend for yourself. Nor was admission to the Hasty Pudding or the eating establishment favored by artsy students guaranteed. Archie would have liked to join the former, because of the weekly dances, but wasn’t elected. And to my dismay, the artsy club did not ask Henry to join. In fact, someone took the trouble to tell him that an upperclassman had boasted of blackballing his candidacy with a promise to block any future attempt. It was Henry’s second rejection and, like the first, he took it hard, to the point of not wanting to walk by the club’s building at lunchtime or if a tea or cocktail party was in progress. As a result, he took strange detours on his way to the house dining room. I didn’t blame him. Except for his Brooklyn address and Brooklyn high school diploma, he conformed so well to the stereotype of a member that people routinely assumed that he was one or asked why he wasn’t, in either case making Henry cringe. He would answer—and sometimes announce preemptively—that it was out of the question for him to join such an organization. His parents couldn’t afford the dues or the cost of meals on top of meals at the house that had to be paid for in any event. I did receive an invitation but never answered. For one thing, it arrived at a time when I had begun to find it extremely difficult to take any action. I may also have wanted to stand by Henry at least once, as though that could have made up for my passing through the door that the master of my house had slammed in
his face.

  Mr. Peabody, the senior tutor, or Tom as he had asked me to call him, continued to show marked approval of me, consistent with his well-known weakness for undergraduates who fit a certain conception of Carolingian knights. I no longer attributed his regard to the term paper I had written in the spring semester of my freshman year, which he had given an A plus. That paper, I now realized, had at most shown him that I wasn’t an imbecile. Tom almost always lunched in the house dining room, and I knew I was most welcome at his table. I brought Henry along as often as I could without creating the impression that we were tiresomely inseparable or that I was foisting his presence on Tom. It seemed to me after several such lunches that Henry and Tom got along well. Therefore, one day when Tom and I were alone at table I asked him why Henry hadn’t been taken into the house. Tom raised an eyebrow and said that mistakes do happen. I might want to tell Henry not to worry about next year. Then he inquired about Archie, Henry’s strange roommate. I told him that Archie was harmless. Oh well, he said, in that case…The sentence remained unfinished. You do realize, I said, that the reassurance isn’t any use unless it includes Archie. Henry will never leave him behind. Tom nodded. Of course, he told me, that’s exactly as it should be.

  That evening Henry and I went to see a rerun of The Third Man. He walked me home afterward, and on the way we argued about the nihilism of Lime and whether Orson Welles or Trevor Howard was the finer actor. The chase through the sewers had made me jittery, and although it was late, I didn’t think I could go to sleep right away. I offered to make some coffee in the electric coffeemaker George had given me for my birthday. We each had a cup. I thought Henry was about to leave when he said he had a question. I didn’t have to answer if it would upset me, he said. Did I think that what happened in New Orleans had changed me?

  What do you think? I said. I lost my spleen, I had broken ribs, my nose will never be the same, and they knocked out my front teeth. Doesn’t that answer your question?