Honorable Men (6 page)

The girls hooted with excitement at the prospect of such an adventure and started to peel off their clothes. Chip felt a cold band of terror tighten around his heart. It was not the prospect of seeing their pink backsides and boyish nipples that concerned him. He had peeked at these before. Nor was it even the vision of his father's nudity; he had seen those long thin limbs, that bony behind and gray pubic hair on fishing trips. But his mother! Could eyes abide it?

“I don't feel like swimming. I think I'll take a walk around the island.”

“But you've seen it all, darling,” his mother protested. “And the water looks so lovely. Don't tell me you mind our going in together this way. Isn't it the most natural thing in the world?”

The dreadful little girls immediately sized up the situation. They started to jump up and down, crying out that Chip was a sissy who was afraid to be seen naked.

“Be quiet, girls!” their mother chided them. She was already unbuttoning her blouse. But when she turned to Chip, he saw the concern in her eyes. She had at once recognized his shame and repulsion and was visibly upset. It was something bad in her son, something dangerous, something that had to be coped with at once.

“Look at me, Chip. I'm as bony and skinny as an old nag, but I'm healthy, thank God, and that's what counts.”

At this she unhooked her brassiere, and Chip was aghast at the sudden glimpse of her breasts, as long and skinny and dangling as a pair of old stockings. Suppressing a cry of anguish only by slapping a hand over his mouth, he turned to rush away and collided with his father, who grabbed him.

“Chip, it's only natural!” he heard his mother wail.

“It's not! It's unholy!” he shrieked, struggling in his father's grasp. “It's wicked and horrible!” And he bit his father's hand so savagely that the latter released his hold with a cry of pain, and Chip bounded away into the woods.

An hour later, lunchless and hungry, he joined his family, silently waiting in the launch. Not a word was said by anyone on the trip back to Camden, but Chip knew that his sisters exulted at his meteoric fall from parental grace.

His conduct had been too shocking for further discussion, but his father the next day asked him very gently whether he would be willing to have a little chat with their summer doctor, a friendly old codger much admired by the Camden summer folk. Chip, knowing now that he might as well be hanged for a sheep, curtly refused. But to his relief and astonishment, there were no repercussions. His father, at least, knew when to lay off. And apparently he had been able to control his spouse.

In August the family went, as usual, to France and Italy, where Mr. Benedict visited and consulted with the principal glass manufacturers of those countries. That summer they stayed with one who had a chateau near Albi, and Matilda, who was a devoted sightseer, but who liked to see her monuments “in use,” even if it happened to be a Roman Catholic use, took Chip to a service at the great fortress cathedral where the crusade against the Albigenses had been preached. She did not believe that a service in Latin could corrupt a youth, and besides, was not the choir famed for its beautiful singing?

Chip, seated with his mother beneath the marble pulpit, agreed that the choir, unseen behind the vast screen, was indeed fine, but when the Dies Irae was chanted, he could think only of all those men, women and children savagely butchered for believing that the world had been created by the devil. Who else would have made it? Looking about, he noted grimly that everything in the church celebrated the wrath and mercilessness of the avenging deity. The pulpit itself was supported by two marble slaves whose writhing torsos put him in mind of the parolee servants at home. The latter, it was true, bore their burdens with happy smiles, but might not their bodies under white coats and aprons be as strained as those of the slaves? The choir screen behind which the angelic voices rang out was covered by a vast mural showing in gorgeous detail the sufferings of the losers at the Day of Judgment. The whole cathedral sang the glory of a power that was not any truer than the heresy that it had so cruelly suppressed; simply mightier. Chip's father had seen the trenches during the Great War on a Red Cross mission, and he had told Chip that
that
was hell. And yet Elihu insisted, as did Matilda, that the words in the creed “He descended into hell” referred to a limbo where there were no tormented souls. Huh!

“Do you think it hurt horribly to be burned alive?” He put the question suddenly to his mother as they walked after the service to where the car was waiting. “Or do you suppose the smoke asphyxiated you before it got too bad?”

“Good heavens, is that what you were thinking about during that lovely singing?”

He came as near as he ever had to snapping at her. The cathedral had made him almost desperate. “Isn't it what your religion is all about?”

“My
religion, child? What are you talking about? I guess it's time, after all, that you went to boarding school. Grandpa will teach you that religion is love!”

T
HEY HAD DELAYED
sending him to Saint Luke's because they feared, even under the beneficent supervision of Grandpa Berwind, the contamination of boarding school. Yet they recognized that to have attended one would be almost a social necessity at Yale, and they figured that two years might be enough.

Chip was relieved to get away. He could breathe at Saint Luke's, away from Benedict and Benedicts, even though the other boys complained constantly of the restrictions. To him the long oblong buildings of gray limestone that formed a square around the dark Gothic chapel were relieved of the dreariness that others ascribed to them by the way they blended into the gray autumnal woods that stretched down a low incline to the sluggish river and the deserted boathouse and dock. Chip liked to walk along the bank alone of a Sunday afternoon, the silence interrupted only by cawing crows or the rush of a startled duck or the deep throb of the chapel bells, his heart moved, not unpleasantly, with a vague melancholy.

Indeed, had his grandfather not been headmaster, the two years at Saint Luke's might have been almost unalloyed pleasure. But there was never any getting away from this relationship or the obligations that it entailed. It was not that Mr. B, as Grandpa Berwind was addressed by all, singled him out for favoritism. Far from it. In public, in class, “Benedict, C.” was treated exactly like any other boy of the three hundred, if not more gruffly. But there were also the private sessions, once a month, in the headmaster's study, where Chip was subject to the scrutinizing stare and careful interrogation of the grave little man whose undemonstrative but still felt love for his only grandson added uncomfortably to all that seemed expected of the boy.

“Have you heard from your dear mother? And your father? I trust they are well. They do not write so often now, knowing that you are here to supply me with their news.”

So the sessions always started, and the personal note was then dismissed, reserved for summer vacations in Maine, when Mr. B, transformed into a chuckling grandpa, oddly attired in white flannels and a loud blazer, adored by younger sisters, would fill the Benedict household with bustling activity and merriment. For all his seventy-five years and plump, diminutive figure, he would still take his turn at the tiller in the catboat, light a fire out of nothing at a picnic and lead the family and friends in a singsong on Saturday nights. But at school, in chapel, in the pulpit, swaying to and fro to emphasize his moral points, the rich, melodious voice pouring forth his silver sentences, those gray eyes flashing in awesome sternness, he was a saint, an angel, God even. But why did Chip have to be the only boy with God for a grandfather?

Mr. B seemed almost aware of this at times, sitting in the big study with the pictures of crews and the prints of Roman monuments, with Chip on the other side of the desk-table, all subdued attention.

“It is not easy to be a boy, Charles. You will think of my own youth as something very far in the past, lost no doubt in the mists of antiquity, and yet it seems to me like yesterday. I did not, like your dear father, have the temptations of wealth to cope with. I was a poor boy in Worcester who had to help my father in his hardware store. Still, there were Saturdays, and I sometimes fell in with the bad boys of the town. But I always bore in mind what our good pastor, who took it on himself to put me through the theological seminary, used to say: ‘When you marry, Peter, you will be a happy man if you bring a clean body to a pure woman.' ”

Chip could not imagine sex with a pure woman. He had a momentary vision of his grandfather and the grandmother whom he had never known reaching gingerly for each other in a discreetly darkened chamber. Those thoughts again ! But there was never the smallest doubt in his mind that Mr. B was right and that the boys who insisted in locker room sessions that a virgin husband would prove a sad hacker on the wedding night were wrong, or at least irrelevant. The world, indeed, was made up of a crude majority that was always wrong and a handful of saints. But the saints were saved.

Mr. B had not long been headmaster. The bulk of his lengthy tenure at the school had been as chaplain, and he had been elevated to the first position only upon the unexpected demise of his predecessor and then only as a temporary appointment, pending the selection of a permanent principal. But as the trustees had had difficulty in agreeing on a candidate, and as it was the consensus of the faculty and parents that Mr. B was doing a great job, the modest little gentleman of seventy was at last drafted for the supreme post. He could hardly refuse; the school had been his life. His wife had died forty years earlier, giving birth to their only child, Chip's mother, whose husband was the school's board chairman. So Mr. B had bowed his head and accepted the call and had then proceeded to administer his institution with a vigor and dignity that astonished the New England academic community. He seemed, single-handedly, to rebut the accent on youth of the nineteen thirties.

In the great depression every premise had seemed to fail. The words of the creed and of the commandments cracked on the marble wall. People began to ask if Saint Luke's and all the other preparatory schools were not anachronisms. But Mr. B was a beacon on a stormy night at sea. His light may have flickered in the tempest, but it was always visible. He preached from the pulpit of the school chapel and from others in schools throughout New England that the Sermon on the Mount was the same infallible guide it had always been, reminding boys that if their Father's house did not contain many mansions, He would have told them. Chip listened, rapt, to the lilting, hypnotic tone of the great sermons.

“‘Ask and ye shall receive!' Our Lord did not say, ‘Ask and maybe ye shall receive.' He did not even say, ‘Ask and very probably ye shall receive.' No, there it is, boys, plain and literal: ‘Ask and ye
shall
receive.' But you must know what to ask for. Our Lord was not concerned with baubles. He was not promising tickets on the fifty-yard line to the Harvard-Yale game or a new motorcar on graduation. Certainly not. But if you want the big things, boys, if you want the crown jewels of life, if you want consolation when you lose a loved one, or hope when you are down, or if, God forbid, you ever find yourselves in the trenches and yearn for courage, then, boys, ask and ye
shall
receive!”

Chip did not make the error, because his parents and Mr. B were both on the side of the angels, of putting them in the same boat. He remembered overhearing one of his father's sisters saying to another that their brother had been a “great match” for the daughter of a poor schoolteacher. Not that he thought for a minute that either of his parents would have agreed with so vulgar an assessment. On the contrary, his father, who had been a senior monitor of Saint Luke's in his own sixth-form year, had always professed not only to have married “far above himself,” but to have been bold indeed in taking from poor Mr. B the young woman who had constituted his entire family. But there was nonetheless detectable to Chip the faintest hint of amiable condescension in the way his tall, spare, bony, tweedy father greeted the clerical pedagogue. Elihu Benedict was like a warrior bound for the battlefield who kneels for the priestly blessing in full awareness that the church must depend on his sword. What was it but the ancient division between church and state, emperor and pope, except that Chip's father was not waiting in the snow outside Canossa and Mr. B hurled no anathemas?

Sometimes, too, when Chip, on his way to class or chapel, would spot across the campus the long, lanky figure of his plain but imposing mother, smiling graciously at Academe as she moved in easy strides beside the briskly stepping, diminutive figure of her venerable parent, the boy would reflect that even the women from the great outside managerial world were inclined to feel protective about the priests of the supposedly almighty.

But it was not up to him, Chip, to envelop himself in the mantle of that immune adult region until he should take his place there. Saint Luke's now stretched to the horizon, encompassing all his vision. He thought that he loved his grandfather, if what he felt was indeed love, and he thought that his love was returned, but what good was that if it was based on fraud? Mr. B did not know Chip; he did not know the pollution and callousness of his grandson's mind. If he did, those gray, luminous eyes would fill first with incredulity, then with horror. The hands would be raised in surprise and shock, and Chip would depart into weeping and gnashing of teeth.

He got on well enough with his classmates. His blond good looks, his facility in athletics, his quiet amiability, ensured that. But his tendency to solitude aroused some antagonism in those who saw in the smallest aloofness from the crowd a note of criticism, even of snobbishness. Why did he spend so much time in the library reading the adventure stories of Dumas and S.J. Weyman? Why did he go on bird walks alone on Sunday afternoons? Had he not been known to sit by himself in the empty chapel listening to Mr. Tobin, the music master, practicing fugues on the organ? Did not even Mr. B, whose faith nobody doubted, imply that religion “took” only when two or three were gathered together in “thy name”? God and Christ had no use for loners, for the “moony”; they favored the playing fields. And, anyway, religion was for the old, the dying. The boys, like Chip's own parents, seemed to believe that the spiritual side of Saint Luke's, and even Mr. B himself, belonged to the category of elegant, precious things that it was the privilege of private school patrons to acquire and that constituted, indeed, a kind of badge of American upper-classness, but that could never be considered in quite the same category as the realities of the marketplace.