Matters of Honor

by Louis Begley

  Quite a story, I said.

  He’s quite a fellow. It’s the most exciting work I can imagine. Besides, we’ve become friends. If I didn’t know that he likes women a lot, in fact too much, I’d wonder whether I should be on my guard.

  Don’t worry, I don’t think you’re much as queer bait, I told him.

  Of course not, he answered, excuse me. But, speaking very seriously, I would like you to meet Hubert and Gilberte. You’d hit it off. I’ve talked a lot about you.

  I told Henry that would have to wait until late spring or early fall, depending on how long I remained in Malta and what I did in the summer.

  Whenever you can will be fine, he answered. In the meantime I’ll get them your books.

  By the way, I asked, how did you manage to remain on such good terms with Madeleine even though I gather the more intense part of the friendship is over?

  A rare diplomatic triumph of mine, he said. I remained available in theory but more and more busy in practice, and then a year passed and soon the other thing was no longer there. It had evaporated.

  TOM CAME DOWN WITH PNEUMONIA within hours of his arrival. We thought it was treated skillfully by the Italian doctor recommended by the hotel. All the same, it cast a pall over the holidays, and I was relieved to be able to put him on the plane for Rome. He planned to spend a few days at the American Academy before the long flight to New York and then Boston. I stayed on in Malta. The old-fashioned hotel and its mostly empty restaurant suited me so well that after I sent off my corrected manuscript I got to work immediately on some short stories that I hoped could be published together in book form. It was late June before I returned to Paris, in the midst of a heat wave. Henry was in Brussels attending meetings at the Banque de Sainte-Terre headquarters, and his secretary told me that he wasn’t likely to be back for another week or ten days. Over the intervening weekend he would stay with the count and countess. She discouraged me from acting on the idea, which had immediately crossed my mind, that I could go to Brussels for the night and have dinner with him.

  He will be much too busy, she said. They work very late and have food brought into the conference room.

  She gave me his telephone number, however, and asked whether the photos of Henry on skis during his second trip with the Sainte-Terres, which he had directed her to send to my hotel, had reached me. Indeed, they had, and I apologized for not having acknowledged their arrival. They showed Henry in a black snowsuit, poles tucked under his arms, his knees bent, executing a turn on a steep-looking slope. I called at the end of the afternoon and told him I was in Paris for just a few days and would like to see him. He confirmed what the secretary had told me: even if he could get away for a meal, it wouldn’t be fun. He was too wrapped up in what he was doing.

  Practically everybody else I would have liked to see was also out of town, but I did have a drink with my publisher who told me that Jean and Margot du Roc were in Paris. Seeing Margot was as good an opportunity as any to check up on Henry. I dialed her number, fully expecting an answering machine, but it was she who came to the telephone and invited me to lunch the next day at her parents’ pied-à-terre, where they were still living.

  As I had hoped, we were alone. I declined the offer of a preliminary drink and we went directly to lunch, which was served by a somber elderly man in a black suit. When he was out of the room, she explained that he was the houseman who like the cook came with the apartment. It wasn’t a disagreeable arrangement. In fact, Jean had come to like it and now expected her to reproduce the same level of service at the apartment in rue Barbet de Jouy where they would move in the fall as soon as the renovation was done. Before I could stop her, she launched into a description of the changes they were making and of the neglected garden with great potential to which they would have exclusive access. Then she confessed that all the ideas were Jean’s and it was he who had planned everything with the architect and then the contractor.

  I complimented her on moving to such a charming street and said I hoped she was happy in her new life; it seemed that she had every reason to be.

  Yes, so it seems, she said, but it’s a rather odd life. Jean works in his study. She pointed vaguely away from the door through which we had come into the dining room. When he needs a break, he goes for a walk in the Cours Albert 1er. Always alone; he needs to think. For entertainment, we go to parties and dinners. I don’t know anybody there, and worse yet I never understand what they’re talking about. It’s not because they’re speaking French. My French is fine. It’s who and what they’re so worked up about. When I ask Jean he says, Ah, c’est très compliqué, and changes the subject or else he tries to explain and gives me a headache. Henry is the only person here who cheers me up. But he is almost always working on something superimportant and superurgent, usually for that Sainte-Terre. He’s like a child with a new toy.

  Her face lit up when she spoke of Henry.

  I told her I was sorry I would miss seeing him.

  It’s a pity, she said. It’s fun to watch him grow into his new position. He’s moving too—an apartment on the rue de Rivoli, just a few blocks from his office. It’s the entire top floor of the building, with a fabulous view of the Tuileries. His travaux will actually be finished by the end of the summer. The contractor has agreed to all sorts of penalties for being late.

  Won’t the noise of the traffic be unbearable? I asked.

  That’s what I was worried about too, she said, but Hubert has recommended a firm that puts in windows that cut out the noise completely. They’re the people who did Hubert’s apartment on the Quai Conti, where he had the same problem. You wouldn’t believe how Hubert manages Henry’s life.

  Have you met this new best friend? What’s he really like?

  Oh yes, she said, at dinner at his house and at the opera; he takes quite an interest in Henry’s old pals. He wants to meet you; I’ve heard him say so. What’s he like? He’s an oaf with a title. When I told Henry that, he almost strangled me, but the primordial Hubert, the ur-Hubert, is exactly that. What else? He’s very intelligent—perhaps not as brilliant as Henry but intelligent enough to understand what Henry’s about. He’s stupendously rich, of course, and very conscious of his position. I don’t mean only in business. The family is very ancient and very distinguished. I don’t think he ever forgets that or lets you forget. But he really likes Henry and relies on him. Do you want to hear something funny?

  I nodded.

  Henry told me—I guess I knew it anyway—that there’s a lot of anti-Semitism in Belgium. Hubert’s business successes aren’t to everybody’s liking, and a rumor has spread that the Sainte-Terres are Jewish, which would explain his rapacity. You can see the train of thought—de Sainte-Terre, therefore from the Holy Land, therefore Israelite. That is, of course, nonsense, as Hubert explained to him. The first member of the family to bear that name was a knight who was given the name and title of Count de Sainte-Terre by Louis VII during the second crusade. It just happens to be the one in which by far the most Jews were slaughtered. Perhaps Hubert told Henry this story to put him on his guard now that, on account of him, Henry is moving in a fancy Belgian milieu. Then again, he may have simply wanted to show Henry how he is condescending for the sake of their friendship. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  XXIX

  HENRY HAD TOLD ME some years before that, contrary to what he had expected, the chagrin and sense of disorientation he experienced when his mother and then his father died did not give way to a feeling that he was at last a free man.

  Sure, he said, no one contradicts me now when I talk about what happened in EBH—Era Before Harvard—and now I no longer have to make those odious and pointless telephone calls or ask myself whether this time my mother has really gone nuts or wonder whether my father is faking his angina. But what kind of liberation is it to be left staring at what I’ve botched? At things done ill and to another’s harm?

  I had no such feelings of remorse about my father. The number he had done on himself
right up to the cancer, which he might as well have grafted onto his gut, was his responsibility. Of that I was certain. One could speculate about whether he would have turned into such an ineffectual drunk if he had been fortunate enough to have a real son instead of a facsimile, and whether he could have been a good father to his flesh and blood, but what did that have to do with me? One could just as usefully wonder whether my mother might have been a faithful wife if her marriage had not been a cold and clammy void. I told myself that they had deserved each other. Had I done harm by fleeing them, hiding behind screens, first of indifference, and then illness? I didn’t doubt it any more than I doubted the thrill they got in earlier times seeing their masochistic foundling crawl back each time they’d kicked him in the teeth. How was the harm thus done to them to be weighed against the harm done to me? By a cuckoo couple who’d had the gall to take someone else’s kid into their house, fuck it up, and pretend it was their own? Our accounts were square; any incidental damage I had caused was paid and overpaid when I bought the house from my mother. That she should take her Greg away was an unhoped-for boon, as Henry might have said, a special dividend. Henceforth, I said to myself, it would be my pleasure to refer well-wishers with smarmy questions about my dear mother straight to her PO box in Maui. Other demons would no doubt sink their meat hooks into my flank, but once the exorcism of the place by plumbers and painters had been performed, the house that had been my father’s and mother’s would start on its new career: that of a handsome late-eighteenth-century gabled structure that happened to be owned by a well-known novelist called, like all its previous owners, Standish.

  The presence of workmen did not prevent my spending August there, which was when George took his vacation. We played tennis regularly, George and Edie against May Standish and me, and often I stayed on for lunch. Over a gin and tonic or chicken salad George explained his plans for a modern international trusts and estate practice that would help superrich foreigners shelter their dollars, shares of American companies, and U.S. real estate from every legally avoidable cent of tax. His model for how this could be done was what Henry had accomplished with Hubert de Sainte-Terre. Not only had he been given responsibility for legal problems of Sainte-Terre businesses, but somehow he had also succeeded in snaring his estate plan and other personal matters. That work alone kept half the firm’s trust lawyers busy, and now Hubert’s cousins and associates were bringing their problems to the firm as well.

  The rule is, George said, that the firm should take care of the private money of all the heads of large business groups that are its clients. It’s the best way to make sure you get to do the corporate work. LBJ had it right: if you get them by their balls their hearts and minds will follow!

  At some point I must have asked him how the firm was responding to Henry’s accomplishments.

  George became very serious and said there wasn’t a real consensus among the partners. If you listened to one of the most senior partners, a big rainmaker, a lawyer should never have the ambition to do all of a major client’s legal work. The risk is too great that the client will begin to take the high level of the lawyer’s service for granted. From there it’s a short slide to asking why the lawyer’s charges for routine work are so high. Never mind whether the work is really routine. The client reasons that if the lawyer does it so quickly and all the same so well it must be routine. Therefore, from that senior partner’s point of view, it’s better to encourage the client to use other lawyers too; that way he can compare. After that, if you still look good, you will keep the client and his respect. I agree with that as a general principle, but Henry’s case is exceptional because he and Hubert have become so close. It’s only natural that Hubert should want Henry’s advice on practically everything. At the same time, there is something excessive about it. Old Derek de Rham swears that Henry now speaks French with a Belgian accent.

  I said that was very funny if true; in my opinion Henry had less of a foreign accent in French than in English. Perhaps in time he could pass for Belgian.

  Another issue, George continued, is whether Henry is going native. A couple of partners from the New York office went with him to a reception in Paris given by one of the Sainte-Terre companies. After their return to New York, one of them reported at firm lunch that Henry was scooting around the room kissing women’s hands. Some people laughed, but old Mr. Allen, who still comes to firm lunch every Thursday, said that Henry is American and Americans have no business behaving like Frenchmen. Believe it or not, quite a few of the partners around the table cried, Hear! Hear!

  I LIKED MY APARTMENT in rue de Tournon and had gotten thoroughly used to the neighborhood. Nonetheless, I knew that I was likely to spend summers in the Berkshires. A bond I had formed with a Japanese writer causing me to spend the winter and early spring in Kyoto, I was in rue de Tournon not more than three months a year. That made the high rent seem an unjustifiable expense. Since I happened to be in New York that fall and had a book coming out in time for the Christmas shopping season—which meant that the publisher would want me to help peddle it in November—I decided to go to Paris in September to close my apartment. There was every reason to think that the new book would do well. If it did, I might feel encouraged to buy something small that a concierge could look after when I was away from Paris and perhaps even when I was there.

  I had missed Henry during several of my recent visits. This time he was in town, and I invited him to dinner. He looked rested and suntanned—the result, he told me, of two weeks on Hubert de Sainte-Terre’s caique, sailing from Bodrum due south along the Anatolian coast. The progress of the yacht had been stately, with swimming at lunchtime and beautifully organized excursions to ruins and archaeological sites. An expert on Hellenic antiquities would meet the launch at each site, along with cars and drivers.

  Etienne and his wife were the only other guests, he added after a pause. I was really very flattered to have been included.

  I said that in his place I would have been as well.

  That’s what I wanted to talk about, he replied. I spoke to Hubert right after we hung up and told him you were here. He’d like to invite you to dinner here in Paris tomorrow or, if you’re game, a more festive one in Brussels on Friday. He’ll send his plane to get us and fly us back on Saturday—unless you want to stay longer in Brussels. I might.

  I was curious to meet Goldfinger, especially on his home turf, and told Henry that I’d be delighted to go to Brussels. Then I asked how the work for the Banque de Sainte-Terre was coming along.

  It’s the most fun I’ve had as a lawyer, perhaps in my whole life, he said. First, I have this hard-to-believe bond with Hubert, whom I really admire. If you can imagine it, at one point he took to writing to me in Latin. It’s no sweat to compose replies on subjects such as what a good time we had at the theater and the refinement of the supper that followed. But he also wrote about business! At first I couldn’t understand where he got the words for things and concepts that didn’t exist in the pagan era or in medieval Latin, and then Margot asked, Well how does the Vatican do it, not just in papal bulls or other pastoral letters, but also in everyday correspondence? Fortunately, I remembered that there is some sort of office in the curia that makes up new words, and it occurred to me that they must publish a dictionary. In fact they do. I got the Italian-to-Latin version and, believe me, there isn’t a single word that I’ve needed for discourse about the modern world that the Church hasn’t invented. It’s all in that dictionary. The funny thing is that as soon as I demonstrated my mastery Hubert stopped writing to me in Latin. So once in a while I send him an epistolary puzzle. Never on firm business, of course. Actually, more and more of my time is taken up by Banque de l’Occident right here in Paris, which Banque de Sainte-Terre controls. It’s a part of the business Hubert cares about passionately. The local man in charge is a Frenchman called Jacques Blondet; he’s been with Sainte-Terre since the beginning of time. He’s very sharp and very deep. At times disturbingly deep.


  At some point in the conversation Henry told me that Margot hadn’t yet returned to Paris from the South of France. Jean was living alone in the apartment on rue Barbet de Jouy. The boy was at a boarding school in Switzerland.

  I was humiliated by the thought of my self-absorption and inattentiveness. I had been out of touch for years. Beyond a vague memory of receiving some sort of announcement, perhaps a year after their marriage, that Margot and Jean had had a baby, I was in the dark. Probably I hadn’t even sent a baby present, much less written.

  Ah yes, said Henry. Margot insisted on having a child right away. You do know his name?

  I confessed that I hadn’t noticed.

  Henry, he said, blushing. Spelled with y, in honor of Henry de Montherlant. That’s what she told Jean. I don’t think that Jean bought it, but for once Margot put her foot down. I’m also Henry’s godfather.