Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  I remarked that there was something ghoulish about this sort of calculation. Henry laughed and told me he had said just that to Margot, who got huffy and, speaking through her nose, assured him that it was done all the time: when people have sick relatives and they are planning a wedding or a coming-out party. Apropos of wedding plans, I asked whether any were likely for Margot and Etienne. He didn’t answer at first and then confessed that he really didn’t know. He understood Margot less and less, although they saw each other all the time, practically every day.

  To be very specific, he continued, we haven’t done it yet, but it’s almost as though we had. I still let her lead—wherever that takes us. She’s satisfied, there is no question about it. As for me, it’s paradise.

  As good as with Madame van Damme?

  He gave me a dirty look and veered into the middle lane to pass the car ahead of us with not a moment to spare.

  Yes, he said, as good as with Madeleine. It’s different, that’s all. What I’ve just told you about is part of the reason I don’t understand Margot. She and Etienne still write to each other all the time. He’s coming to Boston right after exams to speak at some kind of seminar about European banking at the business school, and she’s already told me that while he is here she won’t be seeing me. Perhaps I am some sort of avocation for her.

  Have you asked her to explain?

  Not really. She knows there is this big question in the room with us, and she disregards it. To put the question would surely provoke a fight. I don’t want to fight with her. And I’m not in a very good position to say, How do you expect me to share you with Etienne?

  Do you mean that she knows?

  Absolutely not, he said. Madeleine is very careful. I should tell you that she’s going to be here again, on Wellesley alumnae business. I don’t know the dates.

  He added, with a giggle, I hope it’s not at the same time as Etienne.

  I thought for a moment and decided to ask, Do you understand yourself?

  In a bleak sort of way, I do. I know that I mustn’t get caught. That seems to be my only concern. Obviously, I am immoral, but I can’t believe it of Margot.

  And Madame van Damme?

  Oh, he said, with her it’s habit, the example set by her husband, the manners of the country.

  XIX

  HAVING BEEN STUCK in rush-hour traffic, first on the West Side Highway and then in the tunnel, we arrived at the Whites’ after six, a good hour later than Henry had told his mother to expect us. He had repeated so many times—immediately when he transmitted his parents’ invitation, after I had accepted it, before we left Cambridge, and again as we inched forward in the Battery Tunnel—that Brooklyn wasn’t at all like Lenox or Stockbridge or any other place I was used to, and he hoped I wouldn’t be shocked, that I began to expect to find his parents living in some version of a slum, perhaps on the order of the rundown part of Pittsfield we avoided. As it happened, we came to a stop on a tree-lined one-way street, in front of a substantial stucco house with a minute front lawn covered by patches of snow. This is it, Henry said. I’ll pull into the alley after we’ve taken our stuff out of the trunk. The alley, he explained, led to a garage where his father parked his car. The parents had bought this house sixteen months ago. Mr. or Mrs. White must have heard our voices or the slamming of car doors. They came out on the front porch just as we were walking up the steps that led to it.

  Oh my God, said Mrs. White, pressing her right hand against her heart, where have you been? Thank you for worrying so much about Daddy and me. Where have you been driving? In some country where they haven’t invented telephones? Or maybe you’ve forgotten our telephone number.

  Anticipating Henry’s snarl, I stepped between him and his mother in what later struck me as a replay of my Sonny Boy role and said, Mrs. White, please don’t blame Henry, it’s my fault that he didn’t call, I don’t know how many times he wanted to get to a pay phone, and every time I stopped him. I kept telling him that with traffic so heavy, and people not willing to let you back on the highway at exits, we’d be here much sooner if he just kept driving. I beg your pardon if what I did was wrong.

  Mrs. White didn’t look very forgiving, but she said, OK, never mind. Taking that for absolution, I walked around her to face Mr. White and pressed my house present into his hand. The expression on his face was exactly as I remembered it from Cambridge: preoccupied but mildly cheerful. He said it wasn’t necessary; I shouldn’t have spent money on a present. His wife and he were happy to see me again and hoped I’d have a pleasant stay with my friend Henry. Thereupon, Mrs. White said that the dinner was already ruined but unless we wanted to ruin it even more we had better sit down and eat. Mother, protested Henry, who had remained silent up to this point, Mother, can we be allowed to wash our hands? Go wash, she replied, do anything you want. What difference does it make? We took our things upstairs. I was in a narrow room next to Henry’s. To my relief, there was a bathroom for our use; we did not have to share with the parents.

  Henry and his parents normally took their meals at a table in the kitchen. Mr. Roommate Author, however, was too important, Mrs. White told me, actually smiling, for that kind of informality. I understood that we were to go to the dining room. It turned out to be a large front room. On the two credenzas were displayed porcelain animals, shepherds and shepherdesses, and little silver objects, some of which might have been bar utensils. Impressionist-influenced still lifes and nudes hung on the walls, rather more of them than I would have thought could fit. The table was covered by a starched white tablecloth and set with floral pattern china and a lot of silver coasters, boxes, and baskets, some of which held mints. Candles burned in two silver candelabra. Mrs. White placed herself at the head of the table and put Mr. White on her left and me on her right. Henry was to be next to me. It being Friday, Mrs. White explained, she had lit the candles at sundown. That was when dinner should have begun, if only Henry remembered how people behaved.

  It doesn’t matter, she added. Anyway, it’s nothing like my parents’ house. My husband doesn’t care, and he hasn’t bothered to teach my son. I’m doing it for myself, to remind myself how things were once. This is how it is now.

  Mr. White opened his mouth as though to say something and quickly shut it.

  Henry mumbled, For God’s sake, Mother.

  That’s right, said Mrs. White, go ahead and swear. Do anything you want. So long as your father doesn’t care.

  She brought the meal to the table herself: mushroom soup, roast chicken with gravy, braised carrots and creamed spinach, a salad of iceberg lettuce and cucumber with blue-cheese dressing, cheesecake, and cookies. Henry made several attempts to help, but Mrs. White told him to sit down, she didn’t need food and broken dishes on the rug. She carved the chicken and put huge helpings of food on our plates. I told her that the soup was the best I had eaten. She agreed it was good; she had been able to make it out of real Polish dried mushrooms. However, she disagreed when I praised the chicken. It’s ruined, she said. I should have taken it out of the oven, but how was I supposed to know you were going to be an hour and a half late? The chicken is ruined. You can thank your friend Henry for that.

  Henry’s face had darkened. The effort he was making to control himself was so obvious that I asked myself whether its purpose was to intimidate his mother. I held my compliments until I had tasted the cheesecake. It was really very good, and I asked for more.

  You see, he knows how to eat, Mrs. White told Henry, giving me a slice twice as big as the first one.

  Then she told him to refill our wineglasses, if possible without spilling on the tablecloth. We will drink to Mr. Author who brought us such good wine.

  It was a Pommard I had bought at the Mount Auburn Street liquor store and had the salesman wrap as a gift. After two visits to the Coop, I had given up on the idea of an art book. This wine I knew to be respectable, but I had begun to worry that Mrs. White or perhaps both of them would find that it was an inappropriate sort of th
ing for a young man to give to his hosts. If they held such a view, they didn’t express it, not to me; I supposed that if there was to be criticism Henry would hear it. We ate most of the meal in silence. The hostilities between mother and son made me reluctant to speak unless spoken to or moved to praise the food, as when I extolled the cheesecake. That may have also been Mr. White’s strategy; his one attempt at communication that didn’t relate to passing the bread was to say that, whatever one thought of Senator McCarthy, the attacks in the press on Cohn and Schine were unfair. Henry immediately retorted that those two were contemptible scoundrels. His father raised his eyebrows and told him that one shouldn’t believe everything that one read in the paper, whereupon Henry asked whether he knew where to get more reliable information.

  I was curious to see how Mr. White would deal with Henry. Before Mr. White got a word out, however, Mrs. White said, I wonder why Rysiek always takes the side of anyone blaming Jews. Has a Jew ever been right? Addressing me, she asked whether, as a fair person, I didn’t agree with her that Cohn and Schine were victims of anti-Semitism.

  As a matter of fact, I was convinced that Cohn and Schine were providing plenty of grist for the anti-Semites’ mill, but I didn’t dare to say so to Mrs. White. Instead, I told her that I thought that pretty much everyone, except reactionary nuts mesmerized by McCarthy, agreed that those two were awful, and that I was of that view, but it had nothing to do with their being Jewish. I realized immediately that I had just insulted Mr. White and perhaps Mrs. White as well by seeming to suggest that they too were nuts, but I didn’t know how to undo the damage, so I said nothing more. That may have been the right decision. Mrs. White said that many decent Gentiles had closed their eyes when Jews were abused or murdered and that she hoped I would keep my eyes open because she knew I was a decent man and had been a good friend to Rysiek. With that, she let the matter drop.

  Having refused Henry’s offers and mine to help clear the dishes, Mrs. White served us coffee at the dinner table along with a platter of cookies she had baked, unlike the cheesecake, bought at a pastry shop, and a box of cream chocolates. Having watched me help myself enthusiastically, she addressed me. Mr. Roommate Author, she said to me, what is your book about?

  I had been waiting for that question. It was one always asked by people who knew that the Atlantic was a magazine and had heard that a part of the novel would appear in its pages. I felt particularly uncomfortable because I still didn’t know whether Henry had told his parents about my breakdown or New Orleans. It was possible that Mrs. White was curious about the relationship between the novel and my illness, a subject I wasn’t prepared to discuss. I should have had an answer ready, but I didn’t, so I told her that since I hadn’t finished the book and had miles to go, I wasn’t entirely sure what it would be about in the end.

  But you must know what you are writing about, said Mr. White, who seemed interested. Or do you sit down every day before your typewriter and wait for inspiration? By the way, do you type?

  I said I did type. Since I could hardly deny having a general idea of what I was putting down on paper, I said that I was telling the story of a boy who grows up in a small town not far from where I live.

  Then you are writing about yourself and your family, said Mrs. White.

  Not really. In my book the boy has an older sister and a younger brother. I’m an only child. That’s one difference. There are many others. The towns are similar, like all old New England towns.

  I think your parents will recognize themselves in your novel, she replied. Will they like what you have done?

  I told her the truth, that I was worried about it. Whether Mrs. White and her husband were satisfied by this or had realized that it was time for the television news, she wished me luck and said she hoped my parents would be proud of me. Meanwhile, Henry had been examining movie schedules. He had found a late show of La Ronde at the theater on Flatbush Avenue and asked whether I would like to go. Eager to get out of that dining room, I said yes. Mrs. White began to object on the ground that many side streets had not been cleared and ice made driving dangerous. You’ll have an accident in your roommate’s car, and then what will you do? Besides, she said, you should be tired and just for once you could rest. He told her we were going, but we would walk.

  The next day was Christmas Eve, but Henry’s dentist was keeping regular office hours, and Henry went to have four temporary fillings replaced. He suggested that I take Archie’s car if I wanted to go to Manhattan. Otherwise, I could walk over to the Newkirk Avenue station and take the IRT. I toyed with the idea, because I had never been to the Metropolitan Museum, and then decided against it. I was tired and my grasp of New York’s geography and transportation system was almost nil. Instead, I went for a walk. When it began to rain, I returned to the Whites’. My intention had been to creep to my room and escape notice until Henry came home, but Mrs. White intercepted me at the foot of the stairs and said we would have lunch in half an hour, just the two of us, unless that would be too boring for me. I didn’t have the courage to say that I wasn’t hungry and preferred to skip lunch. When I came down to the kitchen I found that she had put on the table slices of ham and something she said was headcheese, which turned out to be better than it looked or sounded, sausage, rye bread, butter, and Swiss cheese, as well as a plate of radishes she had just finished cleaning. We drank a beverage that was new to me—buttermilk. At the end of the meal, Mrs. White served what was left of the cheesecake and coffee. I had grown so accustomed to university dining room food and hamburgers at Elsie’s that everything she set before me was a treat. I told her so, and she encouraged me by exclamations such as, Eat, eat, it’s good for you.

  You need good food, she told me, you are so very tall like Henry, and went on to claim that she had forgotten how to cook. There was no one to cook for: her husband shouldn’t eat meat or butter or cheese, Henry never came home, and when he did he made faces at what she prepared. When they invited guests—they did so rarely because the few friends they had lived on the Upper West Side, or in Riverdale, or Forest Hills—she gave them cold cuts for lunch and roast chicken for dinner. Everything else was too complicated and, anyway, no one cared anymore. She was wondering why she should care. The house didn’t make any sense. It was too big for her and her husband, and anyway it was in the wrong place. Nobody lives in Brooklyn. Driving to where their friends lived in Westchester or even just to the city if they wanted to go out to dinner or see a play was too tiring for her husband. He wasn’t like other men who know about cars and like to drive; he was like the very religious Jews in Poland who study the Talmud all day and leave everything to the wife. I am stuck, she concluded, trapped, and my husband and my son don’t care.

  She put her handkerchief to her eyes and told me to pay no attention. She was saying things I couldn’t understand, because all day she had no one to talk to; we should talk about Henry instead. Did I think, she asked, that he was all right? I said that he seemed to me to look better than ever and that he was a brilliant success at college—right at the top of his class. Yes, she said, but the people he is with, his friends, are all so different from him. That Archie, that girl Margot, those Belgians, even you. I don’t think he has one Jewish friend. Where will they be after he graduates? All these people will go back to their families and friends, and he will be alone. What’s so special about Belgium and being a tutor? He could make more money working as a busboy in a resort. Anyway, he doesn’t need money. His father would give it to him. He’s such a good student, but he doesn’t have a career before him. What can he do, teach Latin all his life? What’s the use of loving him so much? He doesn’t care. She sobbed and then, as she began to cry quite hard, she excused herself and left the room. She returned after a while, entirely composed; I saw that she had put on fresh makeup.

  Do you think he’s going to get one of those scholarships to study abroad he always talks about? she asked.

  I answered that I didn’t know what scholarship he had in mind,
but that his record ought to entitle him to some grant.

  She interrupted to say that he was so ambitious.

  I agreed, adding that, since so far he had gotten everything he had set out to get at Harvard, she shouldn’t feel anxious. The subject of the van Damme family was one I particularly wanted to avoid, but I assured her that Archie and George Standish and I were Henry’s friends for life.

  Although I had not said anything that I thought could impress her, she brightened and told me he was lucky to have me as his friend. She added, Are you more careful now?

  I was puzzled, and I suppose she realized that I didn’t understand, because she said several times, It’s nothing, never mind.

  Feeling suddenly sorry for her, I said, Please Mrs. White, I’ll be glad to tell you whatever it is you want to know.

  I mean, she said, those hooligans who attacked you. Are you more careful when you go out, at least for your parents’ sake if not for yourself?

  I assured her that I had always tried to stay out of trouble and was even more careful now.

  When she held out her hand, I kissed it, remembering Henry’s endlessdisquisitions about how in Poland women’s hands are constantly kissed, even by taxi drivers when they open the door for them. In return, she squeezed my hand, saying, I love him so much, and I am so scared. He’s all we have.