Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  Aha, he replied, you find that we’ve gone cold. You may be right. I can think of one or two people in Paris, but I would prefer to speak to Jake Reiner first.

  Shaken suddenly by the enormity of what I had done, I tried to assure him of my affection and respect, but all I could get out of him was a vague nod. Manifestly, he thought I was a parricide. Nevertheless, a few sessions later he told me that Dr. Reiner and he agreed that if I did move to Paris I could call Madame Bernard. He had already taken the liberty of speaking to her over the telephone, and it appeared that she had a place for me in her schedule. I asked whether she was a medical doctor.

  Oh no, he replied, that’s hardly necessary. She’s a Freudian analyst, and a member of the Paris psychoanalytical society.

  I told him I sensed that he was throwing me into the arms of Lacan. No no, he said, nothing like that. Anyway, you’re not committed to her. There are other possibilities.

  Thus began the season of my daily treks to the rue de la Faisanderie, so inconvenient to reach by public transportation from rue de Tournon—where I had taken an apartment with a view of a large garden behind the building—that I bought a Peugeot 404 principally to go back and forth between the Sixth and the Sixteenth Arrondissements.

  Fortunately, I had a parking space in the rue de Tournon courtyard. The money spent on the car—indeed, the whole cost of my Parisian installation—did not seem unreasonable given my earnings. Also, Mr. Hibble, preparing to retire and hand over his duties as trustee to a trust company in Boston, had submitted to me the accounts of my trust. My respect for the old geezer shot up into outer space. He had invested heavily in IBM almost from the start, when I was still at school, taking a big risk, he told me, considering the rule that trust assets should be diversified. Unable to restrain my curiosity, I asked whether this was his own personal strategy or one that Jack Standish had also followed. For the first time in our acquaintance, he smiled, then put his finger to his lips and whispered, Shhh.

  The habit of August vacations, so peculiar to American analysts, was also the norm in France, but it applied to the entire population. Not only Madame Bernard, but seemingly all of Paris was on the road. Wondering whether members of the psychoanalytical society had a particular roosting place of their own, I asked where she planned to spend the month. Unlike Dr. Reiner, she eschewed cutting rejoinders. She simply left my question unanswered. In fact, I was going away as well. When Tom Peabody wrote that he was coming to Europe without fixed plans other than to be at the Bodleian in the first three weeks of July, I proposed that when he finished we drive from Paris to Montreux and spend August at the hotel overlooking the lake. I wouldn’t be the first novelist to have tried working there.

  Before our departure, I received a telephone call from Margot. Henry had told her that I was in Paris. For a moment I considered proposing a dinner at my apartment, but that would have been the first meal I had served to a guest, and I wasn’t sure that my very nice femme de ménage was up to preparing a summer meal of which Margot would approve. I invited her instead to a restaurant in the rue Marbeuf, around the corner from her parents’ pied-à-terre, where she was staying. I hadn’t seen her since the late evening when Henry took me to her apartment for a drink. She had changed some more; the quintessential Radcliffe girl had turned into a woman. I asked whether she was in Paris on a visit, Henry having told me about her attending the Courtauld or perhaps working in London. She said it was up in the air where she would live; it depended on news she was about to tell me—if I promised to remember that nothing is settled, nothing is guaranteed to happen. Then she said: I may be getting married!

  I offered the customary congratulations, even while imagining how hard a blow this must have been for Henry.

  She told me rapidly her intended was a Frenchman living in Paris, so that London might be out of the question. He was Jean du Roc, a novelist some fifteen years older than she.

  To her visible relief, I assured her that I knew his name and reputation, that we had the same publisher, and that I had read one of his novels—probably the second one—with great interest.

  I’m so glad, she exclaimed. Did you like it?

  Very entertaining, I told her. In truth, I recalled being surprised that this tale of a young man infatuated with a married countess and fast automobiles, which could have been a joint venture between Louise de Vilmorin and Françoise Sagan, had been written by a man.

  Margot went on to tell me that du Roc’s real name was Lebon, that his parents lived in Chatellerault, where his father owned a pharmacy, that Jean began by studying political science and then, out of boredom, decided to try journalism and happened to write a novel. Of all people, she said, you understand how such things happen.

  I nodded and asked about the wedding plans.

  There’s a complication, she said. Jean is married, and we’re waiting for the divorce to come through. The wife is dragging her feet. It’s malice or refusal to face facts or both. By the way, my parents don’t know anything about Jean; they haven’t even met him. The age difference will be a problem and, of course, money. He doesn’t have a cent. The wife he is divorcing is his second. He’ll have to pay her something, and he’s already paying some sort of alimony and child support to the first. I guess Mommy will like him because he’s so polite. They’ll be in Cap Ferrat in August. That’s when I’ll spring him on them.

  And Henry?

  I told him last week.

  That must have been tough to tell and tough to hear.

  Her eyes filled with tears. Then she collected herself and said it hadn’t gone so badly. Henry had made a real effort to be nice.

  Utter callousness on my part? Inveterate meddling? As though there would never be a better moment, I asked point-blank why she was marrying Jean du Roc instead of Henry White, who’d been in love with her for seventeen years, was single, and had never married. I thought it was the strangest story.

  It is, she said, but do you realize that he has never asked me?

  I told her that, in fact, I hadn’t known, but she and I both knew it was a technicality. If he hadn’t asked it was for only one reason: he was sure she’d say no, and he didn’t want to lose what little he had.

  She lowered her eyes and whispered that even her father wanted her to marry Henry. He had offered to propose to him on her behalf.

  I said I was renewing my question.

  It’s very personal, she answered. You know that I sleep with him.

  I nodded.

  From time to time, she corrected herself. I’m never sure that it will happen. And you know that I’ve had others, and that he’s had others too.

  I told her I knew he loved her and that their relationship took various forms. I knew nothing beyond that.

  She reached out to pat my hand and said, You’re talking nonsense. I know that he gives you at least the highlights of everything. You know it’s tawdry on both sides. It doesn’t matter anymore: Jean makes me do what he wants. Henry doesn’t and never will. He got down on his hands and knees before me right at the beginning, and he has never known how to get up. Etienne—remember him?—knew how to make me get down on my hands and knees and crawl. I made a terrible mistake letting him go.

  What’s become of him? I asked.

  Just what you’d expect. Since his father’s retirement, he’s been running the family businesses, he has married a blond Frenchwoman from the best French society, and any day now the king will make him a baron in his own right, so he won’t have to wait for his old man to die. Oh, and he has three children, little boys, she added. Probably they’re all blond and beautiful too. Then there was a lawyer: yes, another lawyer. I’ve been with him for years, literally for years, if you can be with someone whom you see so little. Someone who shows up without warning and leaves a message: Come to the hotel. As if I were a call girl. It doesn’t matter. He’s married and works so hard and travels so much that even when he’s supposed to be in Europe it’s as if he weren’t here. He’ll never leave his w
ife. I’ve even begun to think that he’s tired of being unfaithful to her.

  I remained silent while she carefully finished her grilled sole.

  Apropos of lawyers, why haven’t you asked me about Henry?

  Haven’t we been talking about him? I protested.

  I don’t mean Henry and me, she said, I meant how he is doing in his career, at the firm, all those things. You know, the way law firms deal with associates the coming year will be the fatal moment for Henry. Either he’ll be made partner or he’s out in the street. Of course he will get another job—there’s always my father. As soon as she said that she giggled.

  I said that didn’t sound right. George had gone to Wiggins two years earlier than Henry and was still an associate and seemed very calm about it.

  That’s different, she told me. Lawyers who do estates are made partners more slowly—because they don’t work as hard and don’t bring in as much money.

  I protested again. George worked very long hours.

  That’s not how they see it, she said. George will have to wait until Henry’s law school class is up, perhaps longer. Of course he isn’t worried. They love him at Wiggins, and they certainly won’t do anything to tick off Mr. Bowditch.

  And Henry? I asked.

  You really haven’t kept up with him, have you? They’ve asked him to come to their Paris office because they really need someone here who can do very big international deals with tax complications. Right now, no firm has anyone like that in Paris. Henry could give Wiggins a real competitive advantage—if it all works out. But he’s very worried, because being sent to a foreign office as senior associate can be the kiss of death: out of sight, out of mind. You’ll be passed over when your group is considered. At the same time, he realizes that they may be saying to him in their wonderfully subtle way, Go to Paris, Henry, or you won’t be a partner.

  That’s rough, I said. You certainly know a lot about law firms. That thought had occurred to me, I remembered, the last time we had met.

  One picks up these things here and there.

  Won’t Monsieur du Roc make coming to Paris that much harder for Henry? I asked.

  She admitted that was true, but not becoming a partner might be harder.

  But what if he comes here and doesn’t make it? Isn’t that the worst case? Isn’t there some senior person at the firm he can ask for advice? I seem to remember that there was an important partner for whom he did international deals. What does he say?

  Jim, she said, you mean Jim Hershey.

  She blushed and I quickly averted my eyes.

  This time I told her the truth: I couldn’t remember the name.

  He did speak to Hershey, she said. He told him to trust the firm.

  What about you, Margot, won’t this be hard on you? I asked.

  I don’t know, she said very slowly. It depends on Henry, on what he is willing to accept.

  XXVII

  MADAME BERNARD and her illustrious teacher, Dr. Otto Abend, believed in imposing a time limit on analysis; she announced early on that we would finish within eighteen months. Having spent many inconclusive, though I sometimes thought indispensable, years with Drs. Reiner and Kalman, I took this at first to be another example of the appalling psychoanalyst sense of humor, an unpleasant joke intended to jolt the patient into heightened self-awareness and fuller cooperation. It turned out that she was dead serious. Shortly before we reached the deadline she had set, she announced that we had gone as far as she considered appropriate. The analyses of her other patients were ending as well. She had accepted a teaching position at the University of Geneva and was moving there.

  You are leaving me in the lurch, I told her. You knew about this university appointment when you took me and decided on the length of my treatment to fit your personal plans. I think that you’ve behaved unprofessionally.

  I should have known by then that I wasn’t capable of ruffling even one of her blond feathers.

  You have it wrong, she said. I assessed your case and came to the conclusion that you could be treated within the available time. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have accepted you.

  Before I was thus cast adrift, with only an untested lifeline to Madame Bernard’s own training analyst, a man with a white goatee who received patients at his apartment near the metro station Gobelins, a destination marginally easier for me to reach than rue de la Faisanderie, I attended Margot’s wedding, which had been postponed for a month by reason of the events of May 1968. The first part, the civil marriage, took place at the mairie of the Eighth Arrondissement, within the jurisdiction of which lay the Hornungs’ pied-à-terre. Du Roc apparently could claim no domicile. Ever since leaving his wife he had been squatting in apartments lent to him by friends going on vacation and in temporarily vacant maids’ rooms. I suspected that his sleek Lancia, the backseat of which was cluttered with disparate objects one would have hardly looked for in a car, had also been his occasional shelter. There was no church ceremony. Later in the day, however, the Hornungs gave a reception at the Ritz, where they were staying. They had abandoned their apartment to Margot until such time as she and Jean moved into a place of their own. That won’t be anytime soon, Mr. Hornung told me. Monsieur Jean has strong opinions about how things should be. He missed his true calling. He should have been a contractor. No matter what kind of place they decide I should buy for them he will want to tear out every wall and move every piece of plumbing. It will take years; I guarantee it.

  Mr. Hornung may not have taken his son-in-law into his heart. However, the reception made me think of the peaceable kingdom, the lamb lying down with the wolf, the leopard with the kid, and the child leading forth the young lion and the fatling. As there was no custom dictating that witnesses for the bride in the civil marriage must be women, Margot had asked Henry and me to fill the role. I was perhaps the more startling choice, and I wondered whether I owed my place to the connection with Henry—with Archie dead, I was surely his closest friend—or to my renown as a novelist, thus a counterweight to du Roc and the two sexagenarian academicians, of the French and Goncourt Academies respectively, who stood up for him. I suggested Etienne for my place or added as the third witness. She gave me a glacial stare, leading me to think that perhaps she had considered such a move and decided against it, fearing that Henry, whose sense of humor was unreliable, would take it hard. Etienne, however, was present at the mairie and at the Ritz, with his glamorous wife and his mother, to both of whom he introduced me. I supposed that I would be able to identify Jean’s pharmacist father, Monsieur Lebon, and his mother, if not at the mairie, then in the cream-and-gold salons of the Ritz, but there was no one there who fit the description I had invented. Taking advantage of a brief conversation with my publisher, who was there with the editor who looked after du Roc’s books, I asked whether he could introduce me. His parents aren’t here, he told me. They’re insortables. Jean doesn’t show them off. He just puts them in his novels.

  We had a late dinner afterward, Henry and I, at a brasserie in the Halles. How bizarre, he said. Why didn’t that idiot girl want me? Tell me why she took him and not me.

  She’s peculiar, I replied.

  And tell me why he hasn’t knocked her up yet, to get a chokehold on the money. I’ve made inquiries about him. He has one kid from his first marriage and two from the second, so we know that he can do it. It’s nonsense that he hasn’t any money because he spends it on them. He doesn’t contribute a cent, never mind paying any attention to them, so having a fourth kid with Margot would hardly cramp his style. What’s going on? Don’t tell me it’s a matter of principle, the struggle against overpopulation.

  The Pill, I told him. Not available to the previous Mesdames du Roc, so they took their chances and got unlucky.

  He didn’t laugh. I’d gotten used to his not laughing at much of anything. He had come to Paris because the graybeards at Wiggins & O’Reilly in the end made their wishes sufficiently clear, and at every moment he knew that the clock in the mahogany-pan
eled office down on Wall Street was ticking. So many months, days, and hours until the dreaded date, when the decision about him and some other poor bastards—George Standish probably included—would be made. No doubt there was a clock in the place de la Concorde office as well, and local bosses watching it too. How much of my suspicion about Jim Hershey was right? If I was right, how much had Henry figured out? These were imponderables. Certainly, I couldn’t ask him. But when he said that Hershey had told him to trust the firm he obviously took it as important advice that he should follow. How clear an idea he had of his own worth to the firm was uncertain as well; he could swing wildly between pride verging on conceit and excessive self-deprecation. George had told me often enough that partners at Wiggins who really counted thought Henry walked on water, and I supposed he would have also said it to Henry. But Henry had seen other prizes snatched from him, and the prospect of being beached in Paris, while nearby the one prize he wanted above all others was possessed and enjoyed by another, was insufferable and terrifying.

  I had told him my analyst’s plan to move to Geneva by the summer, and that, consequently, I would have less reason to remain in Paris, though I didn’t know what I would do next if indeed I left. Tom Peabody was urging me to consider Rome. As Henry and I talked, I was forced to realize the extent to which he had counted on my continued presence in Paris, imagining a resumption of our old intimacy, with daily unscheduled contacts built into it subject only to unavoidable obstacles. Now that had proved to be a mirage. He did not attempt to conceal his disappointment. There wasn’t much I could do to buck him up beyond saying once again that I had not yet made a decision to leave and certainly would return to celebrate when his partnership was announced.