Matters of Honor (7 page)

I hesitated, but because the experience was unimaginable I let myself ask what it had been like to live hidden in a blocked-off room for three years.

What do you suppose? he asked. Do you want to know whether we used a chamber pot and who took it out and when? Or how we washed? Or how we quarreled? I won’t tell you.

I apologized for the question and returned to how he had caught up with his studies. I said I understood about the Latin and the German. But the rest? The English?

I’ve told you, he said, I crammed. What I don’t know, I fake. I have a good memory. Anything I can read in a book stays with me. But, he said, not everything is in books. As you’ve observed, I can’t throw a ball. I don’t know how to climb trees either. Chances are that I never will.

I continued to insist—in retrospect beyond the point of obtuseness—that nothing he had told me should be a barrier between him and Margot. The war robbed you and your parents of lots of things, I said, and you have suffered a lot. The Hornungs should understand that better than anyone.

True enough, he allowed, in the abstract. But practically speaking, none of this is about what we were before the war, or what happened during the war. It’s about what we are now. We have become a different species. What is my father’s business? He has a little factory in East Brooklyn making curtains, upholstery, and stuff like that. He invests in little rental buildings. He learned some English before the war. You’ve heard him on the telephone. My mother is just the same. You can only get so far from where you start. Our starting line is in East Brooklyn. Have you ever been there? I don’t recommend it. Until last year, we lived in an apartment there that was a real hole. Two small bedrooms—no bigger than my room here—a dark ugly living room, and an ugly kitchen. With a nice view of the air shaft. Now we have a big house that’s all right, in Flatbush, a quiet part of Brooklyn full of orderly middle-class Jews. My parents’ friends are like us. They’re all former this or former that. What distinguishes most of them from us is that they got here before the war and so didn’t have to hide in a cellar or behind someone’s armoire. Some have more money than my father, some in fact have a lot, but what does it all add up to in relation to people like the Hornungs? Zero. You made a face when I said Margot’s family and my parents are different species. All right: I give up that metaphor. Have another one. Right now Margot and Margot’s parents are way up at the top of a tree. We’re way down at the roots. But that’s the one tree I will learn to climb. Otherwise, there is no point in my being here.

I wish I could say that after that exchange I stopped debating with him. But I didn’t. I explained how where you lived and how much money you made were much less important than who you really were, inside. That, I said, was the difference between America and Europe. As I pontificated I was dimly aware that I was making an argument that I could not have sustained if the subject had been my own situation. Certainly, my parents were, on the scale of the Berkshires, of a very good family, and at the time I had more respect for Lenox and Stockbridge gentry than experience has shown they deserved. Therefore, except for the small issue of my not being my parents’ biological child, it shouldn’t matter that their reputation was stained and that their spendthrift ways and those of their parents before them had ensured that they would be dismally poor in comparison with my father’s very rich first cousin and employer. That cousin with his spotless name and all the good a good name brings. Yes, there was the all-important country club to which his family and mine both belonged, where we came into frequent, uneasy contact. The cousins, however, belonged to other clubs, to which my parents couldn’t aspire, and lived altogether differently. Could anyone in his right mind in Berkshire County consider my father and my father’s cousin social equals? I knew that the answer was no, but the answer hurt. I wanted to have my cake and eat it, to be judged on my own merit and also get all the help I could get from my name, even though it was a name that, for all the legal adoption procedures, I couldn’t convince myself was legitimately my own. All the same, in Berkshire County and, perhaps, beyond, it was nicer to be called Standish than Nowak or Mahoney.

In the end, it made no difference what I said. Henry laughed and laughed.

VI

I
NOW REALIZE
that all three of us—Henry, Archie, and I—used the word “Jew” with restraint, holding it gingerly with two fingers far away from the body, as though it gave off a bad smell. It was an embarrassing word to utter in polite company, especially if a Jew was present—unless, like old Gummy, you were telling jokes about Weisberg, Goldberg, and the like. In that respect it was not unlike “homosexual,” or some of the less antiseptic variants in use at Harvard: queer, fairy, queen, pervert, faggot, fruit, and pederast. Nevertheless, I was certain that Henry had told Archie he was a Jew or else had otherwise brought it out into the open. I was far from sure that they had ever spoken about the war. One reason would have been Archie’s dislike of what he called heavy conversations. His first instinct when he saw one coming was to run or hide. When that was impractical, he would assume an expression of great seriousness, cock his right ear as if not to miss a word, and, in a couple of minutes, bring the audience to a close by some more or less British injunction to buck up coupled with an offer to have another serious chat very soon. A brisk slap on the back or a squeeze of the arm just above the elbow might follow. It wasn’t that Archie lacked compassion; on the contrary, I believe that he shrank from hearing other people’s troubles because they affected him so very acutely. Very little by way of verbal communication was needed for Archie to take measure of anyone. I was sure that after two months of living with Henry at close quarters he doubtless knew all he wanted to know about him; the mechanics of the White family’s survival and immigration to Brooklyn would have fallen into the category of matters better left alone. He would have heard Henry out if that had been what Henry wanted, but he wouldn’t inquire. I had not forgotten that it was he, not I, who first realized that Henry was a Jew, and a Jew who didn’t much care to be recognized as such. The interest he expressed hearing Henry’s story someday had been, I now understood, nothing more than a polite formula. I had also moved toward the view that Archie’s take on Henry’s Jewism was fundamentally correct: the stuff about always being ready to admit that he was Jewish, if someone asked, and to volunteer the information in appropriate cases added up to little more than the determination not to be caught in a humiliating lie.

Occasionally I thought that I should tell Henry the best policy would be to make clear that he was a Jew as soon as he saw the question coming. I never did. Everything concerning Jews—a subject to which I had devoted little thought before—was too complicated, and Henry’s responses were unpredictable. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I was no good at predicting. For instance, not long after he told me that he was Jewish, I asked whether he had seen
Gentleman’s Agreement.
He nodded. When I asked what he had thought of it, he said that he had liked Gregory Peck and his clothes, the fine apartments, the house in Connecticut, and the restaurants. I replied there was a lot more to the film than the props. The message it sent was important. He shook his head and said, It’s a bottle of aspirin for you and others like you. I protested again. His answer was that Gregory Peck is a Boy Scout on a camping trip. The business of his pretending to be a Jew was like sleeping out in the woods and getting bitten by mosquitoes. On Sunday evening he gets to go home to a hot shower and pancakes with maple syrup. It’s Gregory Peck’s friend, the John Garfield character, he continued, who has to go on being a Jew and dealing with Jew haters. What’s that like? If you want to know what it’s really like to be a Jew, let Shylock tell you. Listen to him while he spews out his rancor and hatred. That, Henry said, is a genuine statement of the Jewish condition. Let Shylock tell you.

By the way, he added, did you happen to notice that there is no mention in the movie about the murder of however many million Jews in Europe? Five? Six? Seven? Shouldn’t that have come up one way or another? For instance, when one of the rednecks calls the John Garfield character, a decorated veteran in full army uniform, a dirty kike. Total silence. What does that say about Mr. Garfield, whose name at one time was Jacob Julius Garfinkle, and everyone else involved with the production? For instance, Moss Hart, who wrote the screenplay?

I told him I had no answer.

There is no decent answer. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer to stay off this subject. Archie and I don’t talk about it.

In fact, I couldn’t imagine Archie letting himself in for that sort of harangue. He was, on the other hand, certainly up to date on the subject of Margot. When I told him that I’d been called to Sanders to identify her, he said that Henry had asked him to come as well, though for a different kind of opinion.

But I’m not doing it, he said. I’m sure I’ve already met that lollipop at Mario’s party last week. She’s a bit of all right.

Mario was a senior, an Argentinean polo player who had made time in his schedule for rugby.

I’ll get Mario to invite her again, and you and I will bring Henry, Archie continued. It’s the only way he’ll ever meet her. But don’t say a word about it to him. He won’t come if he knows what we’re up to.

That was the efficient and agreeable side of Archie, which matched his freckled good looks, neatness of person, and effortless manners. If a friend needed a hand with a practical problem, he was the man for it. The other side was his drinking. I had watched my parents hit the bottle for as long as I could remember. I couldn’t fail to recognize someone for whom liquor meant something quite different from getting silly after a few drinks too many. Drunks marked for destruction like my father scared me; there’s no other way to put it, even when, as in my father’s case, they gave no hint of inclination to violence. That Archie was one of those drunks I didn’t doubt, although he fooled most of his friends by holding his liquor so well. I thought he held it far too well. The huge quantities of booze I had seen consumed at the couple of parties given by Archie’s friends I had attended, to say nothing of what he drank, put me off coming again. This occasion was different. If Henry was going to be introduced to Margot, I wouldn’t fail to be present.

I had no doubt that Archie understood my disapproval. That his feelings were hurt was plain in his adjustment of attitude toward me. He had become watchful. Our camaraderie revived only when we met on the squash court. We played often. He was fast and nimble, and I had to work hard to give him a decent game. For my part, once it was clear where we stood with each other, I began to understand that neither my disapproval, which he surely considered another symptom of my prissiness, nor, so far as I could tell, anyone else’s, mattered to Archie. He had talked himself into believing that to drink hard was a romantic gesture, an act of gallant defiance, one that he could pull off because of the total control he exercised over himself, if he chose to, as well as the strength of his constitution. Squash, incidentally, was another game to which Archie was taking care to introduce Henry, and Henry was eager to learn, rightly associating the sport with boarding schools. Why Archie took such pains with Henry, and had become so attached to him, was something of an enigma. Perhaps it was, at least initially, the attraction of the exotic. Henry was for Archie, just as for me, a strange and heretofore unknown type; Archie’s previous contacts with Jews must have been even more limited than mine, but they had left him open-minded, as he was about most things except brands of gin and cigarettes and other paraphernalia required for a gentleman’s comfort and pleasure. But it wasn’t only Henry’s Jewism or Henry’s war experiences, which he may or may not have investigated, or the ambiguities of Henry’s attitude that so engaged Archie’s interest. What really hooked him, I believe, was that Henry, more intellectual and bookish than anyone Archie had ever known, should be so accommodating, so keen to be deeply involved with him. He was in awe of Henry’s brains and would have understood it if in their dealings Henry had been aloof, perhaps even patronizing. Instead, Henry proved himself an eager pupil, learning the tricks Archie had to teach, and participating, without condescension, in the pastimes that were Archie’s principal occupation—pastimes that Archie himself surely knew were silly. Such acceptance must have seemed to Archie little short of miraculous. It convinced him of Henry’s true affection, and both Archie and Henry, each in his own way, had a huge need to please and to be liked. A price had to be paid, and they both paid it. It is probable that, beyond his mistaken impression that Henry’s successes were effortless, Archie found in Henry’s friendship a validation of his conduct, proof he was all right and could safely dismiss what he perceived as my disapproval. Perhaps the disapproval and carping of others as well. Henry could not have been unconscious of the role he played. What was, in that case, the measure of his responsibility for Archie’s behavior? Did he feel relieved of any by a conclusion, similar to mine, that trying to reform Archie was a waste of time? I wondered whether Archie would eventually come to blame Henry for his complicity; perhaps on occasion he already did, during the awful hours when a hangover slowly recedes, making place for bleak lucidity. That seemed improbable, but then he was more opaque to me than was Henry, although one might have supposed that Archie and I would have understood each other better. His being particularly closemouthed about himself and his family contributed to the opacity, as did the fact that I was less intensely curious about him.

The party at Mario’s was to take place after the Yale game, the last game of the season, at the house where we intended to live as sophomores. Archie and Henry were going to the game without dates. As I had not gotten a ticket and said I didn’t want one, Archie instructed me to meet them at the house, at the porter’s lodge, so that I could corral Henry if he tried to defect at the last minute. The afternoon had turned nasty, the wind blasting through the covered passage between the street and the courtyard where I waited. Harvard’s ignominious loss to Yale had been expected, and perhaps for that reason it had not dispirited the undergraduates and girls hurrying inside from Dunster Street. I took in the red cheeks and noses, the long crimson or blue scarves wound around girls’ necks, the occasional raccoon coat. Such a coat, dating back to my father’s college days, hung in the hall closet at home. He offered it to me, very nicely, the evening before my mother drove me down to Cambridge. My refusal was a surly reflex, and I knew that I hurt him, even though he had his martini pacifier in hand and limited his response to the habitual “Fine and dandy.”

Finally, Archie and Henry arrived. We crossed the courtyard and climbed two flights of stairs. The living room was crowded and noisy. Several people greeted Archie, and Henry prudently remained at his side. Not seeing anyone I knew, I drifted to the window overlooking the Charles, which glistened beyond Memorial Drive like a slick vein of anthracite. There was a stack of records on the phonograph. I identified the music being played as a tango. It was followed by passionate chanting in Spanish. The woman’s deep voice would rise to a vertiginous height and then fall abruptly. It was accompanied by a guitar and rhythmic pounding of heels and clapping of hands. I was drawn to this strange music. The next record was similar and again I listened attentively. A wiry man with very black hair approached me and said, It’s flamenco, Gypsy songs from the south of Spain. I collect flamenco records. You’re welcome to come to listen whenever you like. By the way, I’m Mario Delgado. You must be one of Archie’s roommates, the one who isn’t from Poland. Mario’s accent was as elegant as his navy-blue blazer, and quite unlike the intonations of Archie’s other Latino friends.

I told him that I wouldn’t have guessed he was from Argentina. The provincial stupidity of my remark was clear to me as soon as I had made it. I mumbled an apology.

Don’t worry, he replied, nobody can place me, and everyone asks. It comes from my having been sent to school in England, but a couple of years too late. Come, you should have a drink.

He led me to the table that served as a bar and deftly left me. I saw Henry and Archie still near the door in a group of people shouting so as to be heard over the noise. I didn’t want to shoulder my way in. Instead, I went back to my post at the window. On the way I examined first the contents of the bookcases, which proved unremarkable, and then the posters pinned to the walls advertising Dubonnet, the casino in Biarritz, French movies, and, inevitably, the Moulin Rouge. At the same time, I took inventory of the guests. The girls were all very tall. Perhaps that was the criterion that determined who was invited. Some I recognized, probably because I had stared at them in the library. The others might have been imported for this important weekend from Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, or Sarah Lawrence, or even more distant sources of supply. Among the men, foreigners seemed to be in the majority. They wore tweed jackets or blazers too beautiful, like Mario’s, not to be noticed. Americans, all manifestly upperclassmen, sported neckties of the three or four best final clubs. Blond and serene, they were to a man products of the boarding schools that acted as principal feeders for Harvard College, a species not unfamiliar to me, except that its representatives assembled at Mario’s were, on the scale of perfection, right at the high end. I glanced again at Archie and Henry. Their group was all foreigners, and therefore rugby players. It was impossible not to notice that both my roommates were out of place in this setting; to put it more brutally, they looked odd. This was so not only by reason of how they were dressed, or, in Henry’s case, also his haircut, which was too short, exposing white skin over his ears. It was more their facial expressions. They had neither the clubmen’s blandness and satisfaction with the place they occupied by divine right nor the foreigners’ good-natured bonhomie. There was something too keen and too eager to please about Archie; Henry was nervous and uncomfortable, and couldn’t hide it.

A good half hour had passed since Mario propelled me toward my martini, and I hadn’t exchanged a word with anyone else. I wondered how much longer I could decently continue this way without asking for another drink or taking some other action to make myself a less conspicuous wallflower. I also wondered whether Margot would really appear and, if she did, how Archie was going to manage the introduction. I didn’t think he had actually met her; more likely he had only observed her and found out her name. I had just decided I would give her another fifteen minutes and was making my way to the bar when Margot entered the room on the arm of my cousin George. To meet him this way for the first time since coming to Cambridge wasn’t exactly what I would have wished, but it solved the problem I had been pondering: I would say hello to him, and the rest would follow. I checked on my roommates. They hadn’t moved; standing with their backs to the door, neither could have seen Margot.