Honorable Men (5 page)

But this new humility only jarred me. “I'm not in love with you,” I said roughly.

“I must hope that love may come later.”

“When love comes later, it's not necessarily for the husband.”

“Oh, Alida, don't be so cruel! Do you mean you could never imagine being in love with me? Am I such a toad?”

“No, no, of course not. But it doesn't seem to me that you're the type of man—however fine you may be—that I'm ever going to fall in love with.”

“And what type is that?”

“I don't know!”

“Well, if you don't know, how can you tell it won't be my type?”

“I can't tell. I can only feel.”

“Then that's the chance I'm willing to take. Is it anyone's business but mine what the odds are?”

Well, was it? I had a sudden blessed sense of relief as I leaned back against the rock to enjoy the view. Hadn't the devil been squared?

***

The next morning I joined Gus at the edge of the Swimming Club pool. We were both in bathing suits, but that didn't mean that Gus would do anything so drastic as go swimming. He would sometimes sit an entire morning without more than wiggling a toe in the water.

“Are you going to marry him?”

“The funny thing is that I might. Why did you pick him, Gus? He's not all that rich.”

“He's plenty rich enough. He's got all you could possibly need. The world will provide the rest for a beautiful Mrs. Askew. You can't imagine what your life will be like.”

“But isn't it just what I
can
imagine?”

“You've had the perfect training for wealth, which is very rare. You know all the things not to do. You will have carte blanche in houses, in decoration, in parties. You can take any line you choose. You can be political, artistic, theatrical, socialist, communist, royalist—it is up to you.”

“You think Jonathan will have nothing to say about any of that?”

“Nothing you can't control.”

“And yet it's all happening because I feel sorry for him!”

“That's an excellent beginning.”

“Can you honestly believe, Gus, that what I feel for Jonathan is enough for a happy marriage?”

“It's more than many wives start with.”

“But love, Gus! Love!”

“I'm sorry, sweetheart. I don't regard you as the loving type.”

“Bastard!”

“On the contrary, it's a high compliment. From me.”

“And it doesn't matter that I loathe his old ‘mater,' as he calls her?”

“Doesn't everyone?”

“What remains then to be done?”

“To announce it! Announce it from here. I'll take care of the press.”

“Hadn't I better talk to my parents?”

“By all means. But break it to them gently. They might die of joy.”

***

Jonathan kissed me, very solemnly and very nicely, that afternoon when I accepted him. It was our first kiss, and I began to think everything was going to be all right. And then, of course, bing, bang, we were inundated by the publicity that followed Gus's announcement. It seemed as if the eyes of the whole country were directed on Mount Desert Island in one long, riveting stare. And I had a sense of a nasty chuckling in the clouds above.

Oddly enough, it did not make much difference in the rouÂ
tine in our days. Jonathan and I continued our daily walks, although I had to use all my knowledge of the island to slip away to trails where we were sure not to be followed by a reporter. Our first “public” appearance was two weeks after the announcement at the Saturday night dance at the club. It was a crowded event, because it was the weekend of an Atlantic race, and a large number of yachts and sailboats had congregated in Bar Harbor and Northeast. Many young men, not in evening clothes, bronzed from the sea, lent the party the noisy erogenous atmosphere of the fleet being in.

Someone leaned down over my chair and murmured in my ear.

“What's all this nonsense about your being engaged, sweetheart? Couldn't you wait till I came home from sea?”

It was Chessy Bogart, and standing behind him was the handsomest man I had ever seen.

“This is my friend Chip Benedict. He would like very much to dance with the future Mrs. Askew! Help me, Ally. He bet me a hundred bucks I didn't know you!”

“Will you split it with me?” I asked, still staring at his friend.

“Won't Askew give you pin money till the knot's tied?”

His friend was almost too blond. He might have been the hero of a film of propaganda for Nazi youth. The yellow-white hair parted to one side rose high over his scalp; it was soft and smoothly waved. His skin was very white, the type that reddens and never tans; he had thick muscles, no fat; large hands like Michelangelo's David's; a long face to top off his six feet; a Roman nose; a square chin. And his eyes were light blue, with a fixed stare. He wore white duck trousers and a red blazer, and he conveyed a sense of being afraid of inadvertently ripping them simply from an awareness that the limbs beneath the integument moved with so destructive a force. Chessy introduced us, and I rose.

The blond god and I danced, and I still said nothing.

“What are you thinking about?” he demanded. “Your fiancé? Does he mind your dancing with other men?”

“I was just thinking that I wished I were dead.” My tone, however, was quite matter-of-fact. “Isn't that an odd thing to be thinking on the dance floor?”

“It's not much of a compliment to me.”

“Isn't it?”

Over his shoulder I could already see Jonathan hurrying to cut in.

C
HIP
B
ENEDICT
had known from boyhood that he could always fool people. Why not? He had every advantage in that game. He was the only son of Mr. and Mrs. Elihu Benedict of Benedict, Connecticut, whose social sway over the eponymous town that manufactured their glassware was signalized, in nineteenth-century style, by the Colonial mansion on top of the residential hill between the railroad depot and the glassworks. Chip was accustomed to the admiring glances of the populace and the less feigned adoration of the loyal household servants (all parolees from the state prison). Yet he never lost an awareness that his blue eyes and golden hair, his air of brightness and the invitation of friendship that it seemed to throw off, formed a mask. And had the mask been torn away, the plaudits might have been silenced, to be succeeded by what? By jeers or even a hail of pebblestones? Not inevitably. That one was a fraud did not have to mean that one was vicious. Perhaps one had to be a fraud. Why? Did there have to be an answer?

Daddy would certainly go straight to heaven, if there was one. Nobody could be so benign, so gently ironic, so always in the right, and not be of the elect. And Mummie, too; though she was tense and easily vexed, Daddy could surely save her. And Chip's younger sisters, what were they but cherubim and seraphim? That was, if God really wanted three such sillies. But Chip was the pauper in Mark Twain's tale; he was dressed like a prince and treated like a prince, and it might be very dangerous to be found out. Suspicion lurked and sometimes boldly showed itself, as on the night when Mummie had thrown open his bedroom door and asked him, in an odd combination of challenge and trepidation, if he was “playing with himself.” He hadn't been. That time. The chauffeur's boy did, he knew; also two friends at school; but even if they were damned for it, their punishment wouldn't hurt as much as his. Why? They weren't Chip Benedict.

He had always to be sure not to disappoint Daddy, whose patient demeanor and mild twinkle were supposed to conceal the tenderest of sensibilities. And he had to remember that a lifetime of filial devotion could never repay Mummie for her limitless capacity for caring. And he must set an example for the kid sisters and be democratic with the boys in the Benedict public school and, when he went off to the private academy in Massachusetts that Mummie's wonderful old father headed, he would have to be sure not to learn snobbish ways. Beyond that, beyond even Yale—far away, but the time would come; it always did—he would have to grow up and help Daddy with the company, though this was never said, because he had to pretend that he was perfectly free to be anything he wanted, except (with a chuckle) a bootlegger.

And all the while scarlet thoughts, putrid fantasies, and no love. No real love for anyone, except perhaps for Nanny, now remorselessly relegated to the sisters (boys weren't supposed to need nannies) and maybe just a little for Grandpa Berwind, who came to visit in Maine summers. Why were they always prating about love? Did they suspect one hadn't any in one's heart? Did they really have so much themselves? Sometimes he imagined that God cared only about “seeming,” that this might be Chip's real function, that so long as he managed to look a part, he might be the part, that the appearance of worship, or at least of a decorous submission, was all the dusky deity required.

Chip was treated differently from his sisters by Daddy—he was taken on fishing trips and even on business excursions when Elihu Benedict visited other glassworks—but these privileges were burdened with the sense of how much more would be expected of an only son than of a mere gaggle of younger daughters. Elihu was a kind and patient father, and he knew how to listen to his children, but it struck Chip that he was always listening
for
something; that he was always in the process of tapping gently but firmly upon one's surface in the perennial hope, amounting by no means to a conviction, that he would ultimately find a hollow into which some of the paternal genius might be profitably poured.

This feeling was particularly vivid one June evening in Chip's fifteenth year when he and his father were sitting alone by the campfire in front of their cabin in the Canadian woods, looking out over the quiet moonlit lake. Elihu had twice used the expression “people like us,” and his son was emboldened by the unaccustomed intimacy of their situation to ask “Daddy, what are people like us?”

“I suppose it's a foolish expression, really. What I think I mean is people who have been born with certain privileges and are therefore bound to contribute more than the average to their fellow men.”

“But I don't contribute anything.”

“Give yourself time, for Pete's sake! You're only a boy.”

Chip considered this. “I suppose you and Mummie contribute all kinds of things.”

“Well, we could always do more, that's for sure. But we make a stab at it.”

“By having all those convicts in the house?”

Elihu glanced at him. Was he making sure that Chip was serious? “We try to give them a chance. Most people refuse to employ them. But if they can say they've worked for the Benedicts and produce a good reference, it helps. Do they worry you, Chip? I always check to be sure they're not violent types.”

“No, no, it's not that at all. I wouldn't dream of being afraid of them. It's just that I ... well ... maybe I envy them a little.”

It had been risky, and for a couple of minutes his father said nothing. But when he spoke, his tone was mild enough. “I guess I don't see why you should envy them, Chip.”

“Because no one expects anything of them!” Chip was suddenly excited by his own nerve. “Because anything they do that's at all good is greeted with wild applause.”

“My boy, do you think we expect too much of
you
?”

“Oh, no, sir, not really, no.”

But now he was in for it. Elihu could not let this pass. Kindly, slowly, patiently, he proceeded to review his and Matilda's satisfaction with their son. It was evident that he had detected a leak in Chip's moral plumbing, and there would be no more fishing that night, no sleeping even, until it had been carefully soldered. And there was never any way to answer the question that now began to haunt the recesses of the boy's mind: Would this gaunt, strong man have loved his son had he really known him? He loved a fantasy—that was the gist of it.

With Matilda it was different. She loved Chip, yes, but she gave every sign of suspecting that her love
was
a fantasy. She might still have loved him even had this been proven, but it would have been at a heavy cost to her own self-esteem. She seemed to suffer from agonies of apprehension, as shown on that night when she had barged into his bedroom. What made her so suspicious? Why was she, devoted partner of her husband in the business of re-creating the moral world in a Benedict image, so afraid of cracks in the fortifications and traitors in the very bosom of the family? Sometimes Chip's heart went out to her; he fancied that he was the only person who comprehended the nagging anxiety lurking in the bland beam of those executive eyes. But if his mother secretly appreciated his sympathy, she never dared to betray it. It would have been to admit there was something to worry about. And again, also in that same summer of his fifteenth year, a horrible thing happened.

Elihu Benedict had purchased a small island near their summer home in Camden, Maine, on which he proposed to build a summer camp as a retreat from the intensifying social pace of the summer community. He took his wife and four children to inspect it one beautiful July morning; they brought a picnic hamper, and Elihu drove the motor launch himself. After the family had inspected their new domain, they gathered on a large flat rock by the water to eat their lunch. Flossie, the oldest of the girls, suggested that they should swim first, but Elaine and Margaret shouted at once that they had no bathing suits. It had been thought that the ocean would be too cold.

“It's no problem,” their father observed. “Chip and I will go around that little point, and you girls can bathe here.”

Matilda now demonstrated an unexpected freedom from convention. “How perfectly foolish, my dear. Why should we be so artificial? We're all one family. I can't imagine why we should be ashamed of the bodies the good Lord gave us. Let us all go in the water together right off this fine rock. And anyway, it's the only place on the island where you can get into the sea without walking on sharp stones.”