Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  Neither these appalling clubman friends nor the amount of booze Archie consumed had so far discouraged his new girlfriend, Phoebe Jones. Behind the various facades he erected, she sensed lying hidden the nagging insecurity. With that discovery, the road to her grand objective—building up his self-esteem—was clear, and the distance from there to falling in love was quickly covered. For a twenty-four-year-old graduate of a small liberal arts college in Ohio working as an assistant editor at a magazine for teens, she was very maternal, notwithstanding her own facade of all-business gray or brown suits like those in the windows of Peck & Peck, crisp striped shirts, and brown pumps with high heels that made her half a head taller than Archie. Unlike him, she was a reader, with a taste for nineteenth-century novels. She was well into Dostoyevsky. Stendhal was next on her list. I supposed that someday she would reach Henry James and recognize herself as an updated and milder Henrietta Stackpole.

  Archie sought me out regularly to make a threesome for drinks after our evening games. The reason was obvious: as a novelist I was the kind of New Yorker Phoebe wanted to know, and I was living proof that being Archie’s girl didn’t condemn her to the exclusive company of his Voorhis, Schermerhorn, van Gelder, and Phipps stockbroker and lawyer club mates and their more staid conversation, once they were out of the locker room, about Squadron A reunions, Blue Hill Troupe performances, summer rentals in Amagansett and Newport, and, of course, the importation of Irish and British nannies. Although Henry, like Voorhis, was a lawyer, and Phoebe found lawyers as dull as stockbrokers, she liked him as a fellow lover of books. However, his usefulness to Archie was even more limited than mine, because he spent most evenings and many weekends at the office.

  Even the hard drinkers I knew among classmates who had come to live in New York had reduced their intake of booze to a modest if steady trickle. Archie was a notable exception, as I discovered anew every time he maneuvered me into going out to dinner with him and Phoebe. If anything, he was drinking more than at college, and, I gathered from Phoebe’s occasional sarcasm and stories he told on himself in his old self-deprecating way, he was still getting drunk. Not just at weekend parties but pretty much every day of the week. The first martini or two would convince him that the occasion was festive; the rest was a familiar, drearily routine process. Countless infallible remedies, the recipes of which he had acquired from the most seasoned of bartenders, accounted for his being able to report for work the next day at almost the normal hour and got him through the morning until a little hair of the dog and lunch were at hand. There was also a secret weapon: a tank of oxygen he kept at his bedside. He assured me that a couple of whiffs cleared the head and most if not all other symptoms. I disliked watching him drink, and having Phoebe as another witness only made it worse; I thought it was unseemly.

  The news that they were going to get married—given over the phone by Archie—came as a surprise. I would have thought she had more sense. The engagement was confirmed in the next morning’s Times and, a few days later, by an invitation to a party for the couple hosted by two brothers who were pillars of Archie’s grandest club. I was unable to attend and instead invited Archie and Phoebe to have a drink with me a couple of weeks later at the Plaza. I asked Henry as well, but he was in Washington, making a presentation to the Treasury about the impact of some newly introduced tax on the business of a client. From remarks made by each, and from a conversation with Archie, which must have taken place around the time of the engagement, in the course of which he said that Henry didn’t have much of a social life, I knew that Archie and Henry were seeing each other. Archie wished he could help by getting him into some of his clubs. The Harvard Club, to which Henry did belong, was all right for squash, which Henry had in fact given up because he had too much work, but not much use for anything else. The situation would be entirely different if Henry were in the Union or the Racquet, but that was out of the question. They don’t let them in, he told me.

  Not long afterward I received an invitation from Archie that was more like a plea to have drinks again at the Plaza. It caught me in a moment of weakness, and I agreed although I had pretty much decided to limit our encounters to the squash court. I was late to the Oak Room and saw immediately that he and Phoebe were close to finishing a round of martinis. Archie made some good-natured noise in response to my apologies and got the waiter to take my order and bring another round for them. She told him not to bother; she’d be leaving in a moment. I told you, she said, that I can’t face another one of these evenings. Besides I have a terrible headache. In a gesture of discouragement, she took off her glasses and looked away. There were tears in her eyes.

  Don’t get cross with me today of all days, replied Archie, you know I have a lot on my mind. This will be different. Come on, if you stay, Sam will stay too, and he’ll make sure I behave. Right? He squeezed my forearm and then patted it.

  I nodded, thinking that since my tardiness had given Archie a head start on the gin I bore some responsibility for this unpleasantness. My whiskey and soda came, and I drank it slowly. This turned out to be a mistake because Archie used the time to ingest two more martinis before we walked over to one of his favorite hangouts, on Lexington Avenue and 60th, just a few blocks away. It was I who suggested it, wanting to be spared the taxi ride to the Mafia restaurant on East 114th Street that Archie also favored, but that too was a mistake, because as usual we had to wait at the bar for a table, and it was not an establishment where one waited empty-handed. In fact, we all three had a drink. I was relieved that the liquor didn’t seem to be affecting Archie. His face was red; that was all. Perhaps the cold air during our short walk had given him the equivalent of a hit from his oxygen tank. It was only when the waiter finally brought the main course that I noticed the change. Archie was droning on pedantically, repeating himself, brooking no interruption by Phoebe. First it was all about how the securities firm for which he worked had decided that he would have to spend at least half of his time in Mexico, Salvador, and Venezuela where his contacts were concentrated. He would also have to develop clients in Argentina and Peru. Peru, said Archie, was a cinch. He had a perfect point of contact: one of his rugby pals, whose Spanish mother had vast properties there and a house in Lima where he would meet everybody who counted. Argentina was tricky. Phoebe would definitely have to travel with him, job or no job, particularly her current job, which she should quit anyway as too time-consuming for Mrs. Archibald P. Palmer III. She didn’t have time to answer, and perhaps wouldn’t have answered anyway, because Archie suddenly got up and headed in the direction of the toilets. His gait was unsteady, as if on the rolling deck of a boat before having got his sea legs. I followed his progress, hoping that he wouldn’t collide with the waiters rushing from the kitchen with steaming plates of spaghetti.

  After he returned, Phoebe and I watched in silence while he picked at his food. Archie was an irritatingly slow eater under the best of circumstances. Having vomited, as I surmised from his pallor, he seemed determined to make up for what he had expelled, at least in drink. Over Phoebe’s protest, he ordered a second bottle of wine, had the waiter fill our glasses, and, having emptied his own, launched without any sort of transition into a series of anecdotes about the proceedings of the admissions committee of his grandest club. He had gone on the committee only recently, and his stories all concerned the cunning with which committee members would ferret out, reading between the lines of letters of support and canvassing their own acquaintances, the guilty secrets that the candidate, and sometimes even his sponsor or second, had hoped would pass undetected. Typically, it was Jewish relatives whom the candidate had kept at a long arm’s length, although all his money came from the Jewish family’s fortune. It was much the same with Irish Catholics, and there was, he said, the case of an Italian about whom it was claimed that his family were all landed gentry in Tuscany, whereas in fact his mother, father, and cousins all lived in northern New Jersey and prospered dealing in scrap iron. As he rambled on the waiter arrived to
take orders for dessert. I saw in this an opportunity, and said I had to go home to do a little work before turning in.

  AT THE BEGINNING of the summer I left for Paris. During my stay I received a phone call from Phoebe. She too was in Paris, as a reporter attached to the Paris bureau of Time. We had dinner, and during the course of the meal she confirmed what I had already deduced: her breakup with Archie. She was bitter and upset. The drinking, she felt, had become an instrument of aggression; Archie was signaling that he didn’t want to be married. In any event, that he didn’t want to be married to her. She knew that I was an old friend of his and wasn’t asking me to agree or disagree.

  I returned to New York in late September, moved into an apartment in a converted carriage house in the East Seventies, and invited Henry to a housewarming dinner at which he was the only guest. I told him about Phoebe’s tale of woe. He nodded and said that Archie was off his rocker. There was more to it, he added mysteriously, but he would let Archie clue me in. It was Henry’s third year in practice. He told me he was working as hard as ever, perhaps harder. There was much to talk about, but the next day he was again going out of town and had to rush back to the office to prepare. We agreed to have dinner when he got back, in two weeks’ time. It was his turn, he said, he would take me to a restaurant.

  In the meantime, to get my game in shape, I played squash at midday with the Harvard Club pro. I didn’t make lunch dates, preferring to have a bite alone or to go home and eat something out of the fridge. After one of those games, I was walking out of the club when the hall porter stopped me, saying the chef has his radio on in the kitchen and has just heard that the president has been shot. I stopped and, in my colossal stupidity, asked, The president? President Pusey?

  No, he answered, the president of the United States.

  I WENT INTO THE STREET, and for some reason started running. Running where? At first, I didn’t know, but it turned out to be home. By the time I reached Park Avenue, flags were being lowered and limousines stopped at the curb with the door on the driver’s side open. The radios turned on full blast repeated the news. He had been shot and he was dead.

  But I was alive. A week later I was about to call Archie to ask for a game when he rang me. I must have made good progress with the club pro or perhaps Archie was out of shape. I beat him. He waited until after the game to tell me his news, over a beer at the bar. His engagement to Phoebe was off. I let on that she had called me in Paris. Without giving me time to mumble about being sorry, he said, Now here is the good news, I’m getting married. He produced a picture of the bride-to-be he had in his wallet. She was very blond, blue eyed, slightly on the plump side. German? I asked. I was clever to guess, Archie said, German on both sides, her parents living in Buenos Aires since the end of the war. The father had held a high rank in the German navy and had built a big food export-import business. The wedding would be in six months, in New York. The parents were happy about the location; they knew a lot of people in the city and it would be more convenient for their family and friends in Germany. Then he and Alma would go on a little wedding trip out west. After their return, the parents would have a big reception in BA. It’ll be a perfect wedding, he said, if you agree to be an usher. Henry has already said he will be the best man. It’s a good match, and Alma’s a very special woman, he said with great seriousness. She’s a wonderful influence on me.

  So may I count on you? he asked as we parted. I said I would be delighted.

  That is how I found myself under the command of Henry in a strange platoon of assorted Verplancks, Phippses, and Voorhises greeting Admiral and Frau von Holberg’s guests at St. Ignatius Loyola, and later dancing with Alma’s oversexed Latino maids of honor, every one of them, I had been told, a certified virgin. It had fallen to me to escort Archie’s mother to her pew. Desiccated and hunched over, the general’s wife had aged less well than he. She no longer had the optimistic bounce of a registered nurse; now she looked more like an old lady waiting for a bus in some small town terminal, clasping a huge black pocketbook from which no force on earth could separate her. At the Colony Club the last guests had just made their way through the receiving line when we were called to attention by a roll of the drums, and the bandleader’s cry of Olé! Olé! We all turned toward the dance floor and saw Mrs. Palmer make her way to the bandstand. She said something in Spanish to the bandleader that caused him to give her a handheld portable microphone. The drums were heard once again as she searched in that pocketbook. Finally, she found the sheet of paper she had been looking for, settled a different pair of glasses on her nose, and began to read. I was expecting a toast, although it was not the usual time for the mother of the groom to speak. In fact Mrs. Palmer was saying that if we would look through the windows on Park Avenue, we would be able to admire the automobile she had given Archie as a wedding present. She hoped he and Alma would have fun in it on their honeymoon road trip. Appearances are misleading, she continued. This baby may look like your ordinary Mercedes convertible, but she’s got an engine with twice as many horses champing at the bits. That is why I also offered Archie, when he last visited his old mother in Texas, a week of car racing instruction. Happy flying!

  The band struck up “La Cucaracha,” and Archie did the box step with his mother, who turned out to be very nimble, while all the Latinos—men, women, and virgins—spontaneously formed a circle around them and clapped hands in time with the music. I followed Mrs. Palmer’s precept and took a peek at her offering. It was fire-engine red and very beautiful. When it came to presents, she certainly had style.

  Some time passed after the wedding without any word from Archie. Probably I didn’t notice; I don’t recall discussing his silence with Henry. Then one day after a lunchtime game with the club pro, I ran into one of the other ushers, Bill Voorhis, whom I knew vaguely from college.

  Perfectly horrible, he said to me, when I think of that wedding, and how much fun we all had.

  What can you mean? I asked.

  Don’t you know? he replied.

  He went on to tell me that Archie and Alma got to Denver by plane and were reunited with the Mercedes, which had been shipped by train. Someone brought it to their hotel right before lunch. They went out to inspect it and afterward, as Voorhis put it, had one of those Archie lunches. When they finished, he took Alma for a spin. Fifty miles on, they were both dead, crushed against a beer truck on a blind turn.

  I told Voorhis that I felt sick.

  We all did after the general’s call, he replied, but what else could you expect? The general reached Phipps first, and then Phipps called the rest. A couple of us went out there to help with taking the bodies to Buenos Aires. That’s what the Holbergs wanted, and the general agreed. That’s right, he added, I guess there’s no way you could have known. Poor Archie didn’t rate an obituary.

  I had lunch alone in the grillroom. Afterward, I stepped into the telephone booth in the front hall of the club, shut the door behind me, and dialed Henry’s number. He was on the phone, but I told the receptionist that I would wait. Finally he came on and I told him. There was a long silence. That was, I realized, how Henry grieved until such time as some dam inside him would break.

  So there it was. Henry didn’t know the Union Club gang, and no one—not even General or Mrs. Palmer—had bothered to call him any more than me, so completely had Archie’s life changed. It wasn’t as though Archie himself had come to feel less close to Henry. He had asked him to be his best man, and not Voorhis or Phipps. But to the general and the pillars of Archie’s backgammon set, Henry was as good as invisible, some misfit poor old Archie had been stuck with at college. After I got home I thought of Phoebe. It was more or less the hour when she would be leaving for work. I got her right away but couldn’t bring myself to get to the reason for my call. We chatted. She was with an English journalist who refused to get a divorce, but most of the time the wife stayed in London and let him live as he pleased in Paris. Did I know any single men, she asked, who weren’t queer
and wanted to get married? I said they had discontinued that model, and then, without more beating about the bush, I gave her the news.

  XXV

  ARCHIE HAD BEEN RIGHT about one thing: Henry’s social life. Perhaps getting into the Union or the Racquet Club or one of the smaller and even more exclusive institutions that Archie himself had not yet managed to join would have been a big help. He would have been able, when lonely, to seek shelter and company at the club bar and the members’ dinner table. Perhaps he would have acquired a taste for the ambient conversation and by and by become a desirable extra, a man in demand among the wives to whose husbands he lost at backgammon. Except that he would have found it hard not to win.

  Certainly, he had the cultural riches of New York at his disposal. But the peonage in which New York law firms like his held associates—at partners’ beck and call at any hour of the day or night, weekends and holidays included—made going to a movie, play, or concert frustratingly difficult, unless one went alone or someone was always available, resigned to last-minute cancellations and good-natured about them. That was usually a long-suffering wife. Many of Henry’s colleagues had them as well as children in various stages of teething and toilet training, and those with money of their own also had nannies to push the prams, change the diapers, give the bottle, and otherwise keep the little angels out of their parents’ hair. That did not mean, however, that they were apt to rush off to see a Broadway show and say to themselves, Wouldn’t old Henry like to come along. Much more likely, as part of a round-robin of invitations exchanged within the inbred and hermetically closed world of posh law firms and investment banks, they would be giving or attending a refined little dinner at the apartment of some other young couple on the Upper East Side or possibly the Upper West Side. The table would be aglow with wedding-present linen, silver, crystal, and china, a display of which poor Mrs. White herself would have approved. The martini glasses having been twice filled and twice emptied, the hostess and the most enterprising of the other husbands would serve the meal: six times out of ten, it consisted of stuffed quail, wild rice, Brie (small slices of which had already appeared on Norwegian flat bread as hors d’oeuvres), and, for dessert, perhaps a fruit tart purchased at Dumas on Lexington Avenue, all washed down with more Beaujolais than was good for anyone. Scotch and soda and Cognac followed. It didn’t matter all that much if one of the husbands—even the host!—had found himself stuck at the office or, having gone to the printer to proofread changes in some registration statement, missed the party and didn’t appear at home until dawn, just in time to shave, change his shirt, and head back to the office. The good-sport supergirl he had married would cope, just as she coped with everything that stood in the way of living like Mommy and Daddy. Meanwhile, the men lucky enough to have a night away from the office would exchange tall stories about deals they were on, the billable hours they had racked up the previous week or month and since the beginning of the year, the eccentricities of partners they worked for, and, if all other similar subjects had been exhausted, the finer points of opinions rendered to lenders in secured financings. They took stock of one another, as it was a close and unsettling question which form of chic was higher: to have come directly from downtown, bearing a Peal’s attaché case heavy with documents to be studied and marked up before the sun rose (as though any such thing could be accomplished after the second after-dinner whiskey or Cognac) or to have stopped at home and slipped into a pretty Jermyn Street shirt and blue blazer from Anderson & Sheppard.