Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  He protested, claiming that I was playing a game with him. Had I not understood that he was asking whether I had become afraid of people?

  I was genuinely taken aback and told him so. After a moment of thought, I said I didn’t think so. I might be more careful to avoid townies prowling the streets at night spoiling for a fight. The big mistake in New Orleans was that somehow we had gotten the idea that, as harmless tourists, George and I had some sort of diplomatic immunity. I would never make that mistake again anywhere because if anything the contrary was more true.

  Henry thanked me for the coffee and said goodnight.

  I didn’t sleep that night, and the one benefit of lying in bed wide awake was that eventually I grasped this was a follow-up on the question he had asked the day I got back: that he had been groping for some sort of similarity between my experience of brutality in New Orleans and his terror at being subjected to something of that sort during the war. My obtuseness, I realized, must have been like a slap in the face. Normally, first thing in the morning I would have looked for an opportunity to apologize and ask him to come back for a talk, but something bad was happening to me. I found it difficult at the time to describe just what it was without bathos, and I am not sure that I can do it any better now. My reluctance to take the simplest everyday actions and to make decisions increased to the point of not doing anything and deciding nothing. For instance, more often than not I didn’t answer the telephone when it rang. I could not bring myself to make calls, even those that I ordinarily would have thought routine and necessary. I did not get out of bed when the biddy came in to do my room. I was crushed by fatigue. I stopped going to classes and taking meals in the house dining room. When hunger forced me, I dressed perfunctorily and went to get something at Elsie’s, two blocks away. Attendance at classes wasn’t compulsory, but in addition to cutting them and not doing any reading, I failed to show up for the midterm exams. It’s possible that I actually didn’t know when or where they were scheduled to take place. I no longer listened to the radio or to records, although being able to play my Bach undisturbed had been one of my reasons for insisting on private quarters, and I had brought from home both my record collection and the record player that had been my Christmas present. Most frightening, it seemed to me that I no longer knew how to sleep or even fall asleep, except for sudden catnaps that were more like a loss of consciousness. At night, I lay under the covers quite helpless, my eyes open or shut—it didn’t matter which—condemned to work out arithmetical problems that surged up like dreams and perhaps were dreams. I would get near to the solution and find that an element was missing or else I would lose some necessary thread of my reasoning. I knew that the problems were absurd and that I couldn’t possibly work them out in my head, but that didn’t stop my trying or make me get up, turn on the light, and attempt to solve them on paper. Of course, they would have vanished at once. I even lost the will to masturbate, although I had learned at school to make it the regular prelude to sleep. When I went at it anyway, hoping for the usual release, I couldn’t even get a hard-on. Another nocturnal torment was an itch that afflicted every part of my body. I scratched and tossed in my bed; my skin was loathsome to me; I thought that my bones would burn with heat.

  I didn’t want to see Henry or George. When one of them called saying we should get together, I was evasive or said I was too tired. I doubt that being with them would have made a difference: they coddled me and at the same time took it for granted that I would go on looking and feeling awful for many months. Since we weren’t taking the same courses, there was no reason for them to know that I hadn’t bothered to go to class or that I hadn’t taken the midterms. Tom Peabody may have noticed my absence from the dining room and drawn his own conclusions. Possibly there had been some sort of official notice sent to him about the midterms. Whatever the reason, a few days later, unannounced, he stopped by after lunch. I was in bed and had left my trousers and shirt on the desk chair. He took in the scene, sat down on the edge of my bed, and said that he hadn’t been seeing me in the dining room. Without additional preliminaries, he told me he had had the impression that I was going to pieces, which was now confirmed. He made a gesture with his hand that took in my unshaved and uncombed condition and the mess all around me.

  What’s going on? he asked.

  I told him as much as I knew how. I had been waiting for that question to be asked by the right person.

  XIV

  FEAR AND DESPAIR FOLLOWED. Sent by Tom to the university health services, I found myself several days later once again in a room decorated with execrable Harvardiana—on the walls two class banners, ’37 and ’42, assorted pennants, a group photograph of the football team, and engraved views of Sever, Emerson Hall, and Sanders in thick black frames, Harvard chairs, and Harvard ashtrays—talking to the pipe-smoking university psychiatrist, Dr. Winters. He had reviewed the tests, he told me, and the notes of two previous interviews. There was no doubt about my condition: I had hit a bad bump and was still in an uncontrolled skid. I didn’t reply. After a couple of puffs, he spoke again, and said that I was a sick young man. I was, however, far from the scrap yard. My ailment, while serious, was closer to a mild than to a severe depression. With intensive treatment I should be able to get back on the road. I asked whether this meant I had to be in a hospital. Not necessarily, he answered. Let’s talk about the treatment after you’ve seen the dean. At University Hall, the dean in charge of my case, a nice man who also smoked a pipe, told me that I had been placed on medical leave. Suddenly, I felt bereft. What was to become of me? I didn’t protest but asked whether I would be allowed to return and how long it would be. I was hoping that he hadn’t noticed that I trembled.

  Mr. Standish, he told me, you have to be realistic. You aren’t up to doing the work. You’re not taking care of yourself. There’s no point in your being here while you’re in this condition. Come back when you are well. He added that he would be in touch with the senior tutor of my house. Though crushed, I couldn’t help thinking that he was right.

  It turned out that the dean didn’t stop at notifying Tom Peabody. Without any warning he called my parents, a betrayal that rankled, although when Tom, whose patience I thought might be wearing thin, observed that I couldn’t have imagined that they would be left in the dark, I had no answer other than to repeat querulously that he should have spoken to me first. So they came down to Cambridge and joined in the debate about where to put me away. What to do about the crazy son? My father’s presence was particularly loathsome. I disliked his long fingers, pale and freckled just like mine, drumming on the table, his polite and pedantic diction, and his eyes, pale blue like mine, that tried to smile but were to me the eyes of a drunk in which I could always discern the little blood vessels no matter how much Murine had washed across them. The rage he put me in was a distraction from my mother and, although I did not then realize it, from the void Dr. Winters was opening before me. He too was not to be trusted. To hear him, now that he’d gotten an audience, and all three of them had me by the balls, the only choice I had was among hospitals. I suspected that he had a list a yard long, but there were three he favored: McLean, in Belmont, just outside of Cambridge, Silver Hill in Connecticut, and, of all places, Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge. I said I wouldn’t go to any of them. McLean was a place of straitjackets and electric shock therapy; the name alone filled me with dread. I had scorn for the other two, Silver Hill because of tales I had heard of alcoholics sent there to dry out who returned after long sojourns only to hit the bottle—in fact, at one time, my mother had badgered my father to check in there—and Riggs because, in Berkshires folklore, it was a place for rich crackpots and wastrels hiding from husbands, wives, children, and other sundry obligations. I didn’t want to be known as a Riggs patient, and I didn’t budge when Dr. Winters changed tack and began to tell me that perhaps I could be an outpatient there. My parents hadn’t much to say about any of this, and they shut up altogether when Riggs was named. I saw th
rough them. It wouldn’t have been at all convenient to have me there. In any other loony bin, I would be out of sight and, as they might hope, out of mind. George’s parents would know, because of George, but they wouldn’t carry tales about their son’s rescuer. Especially since they might think it was all his fault. So we were at an impasse, because neither the doctor nor my parents seemed to have any stomach for having me locked up against my will. Perhaps it couldn’t be done and they knew it. Tom, whom I had begun once more to consider the only person I could trust, came up with a solution. I would remain in Cambridge and live off campus under the care of a local psychiatrist. He got both the dean and Dr. Winters to agree to the principle, and then came up with the psychiatrist and the lodging. By the end of the week after Thanksgiving, I had become a paying boarder at the house of Madame Shouvaloff in De Wolfe Street and a patient of Dr. Jacob Reiner. As my parents were leaving, I told them I wouldn’t be home for Christmas.

  A long time into my analysis, Tom Peabody, whose store of gossip was inexhaustible, told me something of my analyst’s personal history. He had preceded his mentor, Dr. Freud, into exile and was living in London at the time of the Anschluss. With Freud dead and the war likely to spread, he decided that New York would be a better refuge. Dr. Brill and other influential friends at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute pulled strings enabling him to obtain a visa for himself and his wife and, in 1940, he was already taking licensing examinations and conducting training analyses at the Institute. Around that time, Frau Dr. Reiner decided to go her separate way with a widowed Viennese art dealer. It was just as well, since Dr. Reiner was about to acquire an interesting patient: Grace Leffingwell, a young and ethereal descendant of Henry Clay Frick. It might have been more seemly not to personalize the relationship until Grace’s analysis had been brought to completion. The end, however, wasn’t in sight, and Dr. Reiner made his move, winning Grace’s heart and hand to the horror of her family and the New York psychoanalytical establishment. The new Mrs. Reiner, married to a Jew, was promptly thrown out of the Junior League and dropped from the Social Register, the latter indignity being, in Tom’s opinion, comical, since the New York Social Register was only slightly more exclusive than the telephone directory. The trusts and the money, however, couldn’t be snatched away from Grace by the irate Leffingwells and Fricks. More to the point, those millions, and the family connections even if they were strained, had an intimidating effect on Dr. Reiner’s colleagues: there was no move to sever his connection with the Institute. Even so, he no longer found the New York professional scene congenial. An affiliation with the Harvard Medical School became available, and a psychiatrist, who had trained in Vienna and was practicing in Cambridge, had an opening for Grace as a patient. The move to new quarters on Sparks Street was completed with the kind of dispatch that only the possession of a great fortune makes possible.

  The brick house at the corner of Highland and Sparks Streets, where I went every morning at ten Monday through Friday, was remarkable only for its gleaming black shutters. The waiting room was reached by a separate side entrance. From there, a leather-padded door led to the office. Dr. Reiner required absolute punctuality. One arrived on the hour; the session began immediately and was over in fifty minutes flat. The point was to pick up one’s coat and any other belongings from the waiting room and leave before the next patient arrived. In my case the system failed only once. Arriving a minute or two early I met in the waiting room the wife of my odious housemaster. She was just leaving. I bowed and said hello. She returned my greeting absently. I didn’t mention the contretemps to Dr. Reiner.

  I wonder whether psychoanalysis has ever helped one become like the people one envies and admires, who have power to hurt and will do none, husbanding nature’s riches from expense, secure in their knowledge of what life owes them. For instance, George Standish. Dr. Reiner did not turn me into a more intellectual George, and gradually I came to understand that such was not his ambition. During two weeks or so I sat in a straight chair, his desk between us, and gave rambling confused answers to questions about my family. I have always had a tendency to ramble; for once I wasn’t obliged to keep it in check. Then the drill changed: I lay on a couch like the one in Freud’s study in Vienna, a large framed photograph of which hung above me, Dr. Reiner off to the side where I couldn’t see him, and tried to connect words to dreams I was teaching myself to remember. Dr. Reiner had warned me that he would speak only “to get me into the right lane on the highway.” Except for the occasional “this needs more work” and the few times when I asked to speak to him as though we were two normal human beings, that turned out to be all. He wasn’t silent, however: he whistled nonstop, almost noiselessly, what I thought was invariably the same tune. One day, while I lay still, my head empty, unable to speak, I recognized it: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” A feeling of outrage overcame me. I sat up and yelled, For Christ’s sake, stop whistling. Oh, he answered, you have noticed. I will stop.

  Had he been goading me? I came to think it must be so; the whistling had to be voluntary. If it were a real tic, beyond his control, I reasoned, he wouldn’t have replied as he had. Finally, I asked him. The question was futile. He threw it back at me with What do you think? Equally futile was a question I put to him later, at a time of mounting frustration with my utter lack of progress: What makes you think, I said, that you can understand me? You can’t. You weren’t brought up here; you learned your English at school; you’re a Jew. I sat up and stared him in the face. He didn’t smile or frown. That’s all beside the point, he told me. Getting to the bottom of your problems is your job; I’m only directing traffic. Then he tittered. I yelled at him a second time: I hope I never hear a shrink use another goddamn automobile metaphor so long as I live. Why don’t you apes learn how to talk! He said nothing. I got up from the sofa and left without saying goodbye, a good twenty-five minutes of my hour remaining. Hayes-Bickford, where I went for coffee, was deserted. There wasn’t a soul I knew left in Cambridge. Everybody, Tom Peabody included, had left for the spring break. It was too early to go to the movies. Instead, I walked for hours, retracing the itinerary Henry had followed after he had met Margot at Mario’s party, although I avoided Sparks Street. The next morning I was back in Dr. Reiner’s consultation room. He didn’t reprove me, and I didn’t say I was sorry; we resumed whatever it was we were doing. In obedience to him I hadn’t gone near The Interpretation of Dreams or any other work on psychoanalysis. The previous day, however, during my walk, it occurred to me that perhaps the question I had put to Dr. Reiner about his undertaking to analyze a fine flower of New England like me was stupid. Wasn’t it likely that from his point of view the development of neuroses was governed by quasi-mechanical rules that applied generally, so that cultural differences between him and me, although interesting, didn’t matter very much? I tried this insight on him some sessions later. He told me we weren’t there to discuss theories.

  At the end of July, Dr. Reiner left for his usual summer vacation on the Cape. I didn’t even think to ask him whether we had finished. Some weeks earlier, I had reminded him that the deadline for letting the college know whether I would be returning in the fall was upon us and asked his opinion. The question, he replied, was whether I would like to return. I said I would. But was he able to give me the sort of document about my health that would satisfy the dean’s office?

  Back to college in September, he mused. That’s soon, Mr. Standish. All the same, if you want to do it, I think you should.

  I said that I was getting better.

  Everything is relative, he replied. I’d rather say that your approach to your problems has been changing in a positive direction. You need to keep up the momentum. I recommend that you remain in treatment, certainly so long as you are at the college. Perhaps later as well.

  I asked whether it would be five times a week.

  He nodded. Yes, with me or another qualified therapist.

  And when will it be over? I asked again.
/>   I can’t tell you, he answered. Most likely, you will be the first to know.

  A part of the answer was what I had hoped for: it meant that I wouldn’t be set adrift. Although by this time I knew that Dr. Reiner was more expensive than the two other psychiatrists on the university’s referral list, I decided to remain with him. Mr. Hibble didn’t seem to mind, and I was glad to think that was all I really needed to worry about.

  I spent the month of August at Madame Shouvaloff’s reading French novels and listening to stories she told in French of her late husband, a favorite in the tsar’s corps of pages, who escaped from Russia in the course of some movement of a White division across Siberia. Further improbable adventures brought him to Harvard, where he coached the fencing team. Her own family, she told me, was no less grand than the late prince’s. She was a Karouguine. I might have liked to remain her lodger, but Tom Peabody’s wiles secured for me again the single suite in O entry. During my absence he had used it to lodge visiting lecturers attached to the house. Those two rooms of my own tipped the scale against reminiscences told over glasses of tea with raspberry preserves redolent of Russia.

  XV

  IT IS TIME I brought Henry back onstage.

  Tom Peabody’s promise—in the end I interpreted it as such—was made good; in the fall of their junior year Henry and Archie moved into the house. I was back in my old quarters, as a sophomore, readjusting to college life. It wasn’t long before the old intimacy between Henry and me was reestablished. We saw each other at meals and often late in the evening in my room. Henry liked to stop by. If I had finished my work and wasn’t asleep, we talked, sometimes past midnight. On one such evening soon after the beginning of the semester he asked me, out of the blue—unless it was apropos of the course in Jacobean drama I was taking—whether I had ever heard of a fin de siècle French playwright called Alfred Jarry or his play Ubu Roi, both of which he said were very famous. He spelled Jarry and Ubu. I shook my head.