Honorable Men (15 page)

When I saw one morning from the living room window Chessy's blue Chevrolet pull up by our door, I thought at first it was Suzy. Chip had gone to school, as I assumed his friend had. But then I recognized Chessy at the front door alone, looking graver than I had ever seen him.

“I've got to talk to you, Alida.”

“You look as if you could do with a cup of coffee.”

“I'd rather have a whiskey, thank you.”

“At ten o'clock in the morning? Well, you know where it is.”

When we were settled by the fire, which I had lit, for it was a cold day, he began.

“Do you remember Bob Reardon?”

I did. He had been a classmate of Chip and Chessy's, a Virginian, from Norfolk, an agreeable but silent young man, an editor of the Review, who had shot himself in the cellar of his fraternity house the spring before for no reason that anyone had ever been able to determine. But Virginia men could be like that, I had learned—inscrutable, mysterious.

“Of course. Chip asked him out here a couple of times. He didn't say much, but his silences were better than our yacking. Have they ever found out...?”

“Why he did it? No. But that's not why I bring him up. His mother recently sent Chip a folder of his Law Review notes. She thought they might be of some use.”

“How considerate. And were they?”

“Wait. You will be the judge of that. Do you recall how hotly Chip has been after me to write a note for the February issue?”

“Oh, yes. I really don't see why, Chessy, you make it so hard for him.”

“Well, I wrote the damn note. It was on what constitutes a failure to bargain collectively under the Labor Relations Act. It was a subject that I had assigned last year to Bob Reardon and on which he had submitted an outline. I decided to use the poor fellow's outline, and I wrote the note. Chip accepted it and scheduled it for the February issue.”

I looked at him blankly. “Is there some question of plagiarism? Surely an outline's nothing.”

“A mere outline is nothing, I agree. But there's more to come. In Reardon's portfolio there was an almost completed note that bore a curious resemblance to mine. Enough so for Chip to accuse me of plagiarism.”

My little world, bounded by the Blue Ridge and Mr. Jefferson's rotunda, tottered. “But if you didn't have Bob's draft...?”

“Ah, but Chip says I must have. He has removed my note from the galleys of the February issue. He has replaced it with an old one of his own that he brought up to date.”

“So that's why he worked till dawn the last two nights! I wondered what had happened.”

“Yes. He said he had to fill the space somehow.”

“But how do you explain it, Chessy? A fantastic coincidence?”

“A coincidence. They happen, you know. Possibly Reardon and I had discussed his note in more detail than I remember. But I promise you, Alida, I did not have a copy of that draft.”

“Why couldn't Chip have published the note with both yours and Reardon's initials on it?”

“I suggested that. He turned it down flat. He said it would be compounding a crime. That he could not do such a thing under the university's honor system. Or, he added, under his own.”

I looked hard at Chessy's oddly constricted countenance. Was he, who laughed at everything, restraining a laugh at this? I groped for a spar amid the swish of sinking vessels.

“Anyway, it's over.”

“But it's not. Chip says if I don't resign from law school, he'll report the matter to the Honor Court.”

“You're not serious!”

“Would even I be guilty of that joke? You must talk to Chip, Alida. You must make him see some kind of sense. I verily believe the man's gone mad!”

“Then what can I do?” I moaned.

Chessy and I discussed the matter passionately for another forty minutes, but we added nothing to what I have already described. It was an hour after he left before Chip came home for lunch, and I had had two stiff drinks out of the bottle Chessy had opened. Chip picked up the glass by my chair, sniffed it and said tersely, “Chessy, of course, has been here.”

“Darling, let me get
you
a drink before we discuss it.”

“I have no need of one. You know how I feel about drinking before six.”

“But this is a crisis.”

“I don't know that it's a crisis. It's a tragedy. For Chessy, anyway. And, to a lesser extent, for me. Because our friendship will hardly survive it. It's certainly not a crisis in the sense that there's anything to do about it. It's done.”

“You mean the note's withdrawn.”

“Well, that of course. I was referring to my ultimatum to Chessy.”

“Surely you won't stick to it!”

“What are you talking about, Alida? Of course I'll stick to it.”

“You mean you'll deliberately ruin Chessy's law career? Maybe his whole life as well?”

Oh, how tightly Chip set his lips! He was silent for a few minutes while he controlled his impatience. When he spoke, his tone was clipped, almost condescending. “You are being dramatic. Chessy's career will not be ruined unless he chooses to go before the Honor Court. If he does that and is convicted—as I have little doubt he would be—he will be expelled from the university without credit. If on the other hand he resigns, on any grounds he chooses—health, lack of funds, ailing parents—he will be able to transfer to another law school. The Wall Street firm that has already offered him a job will probably not be too concerned. Actually, I am doing him a great favor. For I'm not at all sure that my failing to report him isn't in itself a violation of the honor code.”

“But, darling, how can you be so sure that he copied that note? Couldn't the resemblance be a coincidence? Chessy swears it was!”

“You can judge for yourself. I've got both notes in my briefcase.”

“But what do I know about collective bargaining?”

“You don't have to know anything about it. The similarities are obvious. A child could see that Chessy was a plagiarist. And I don't think any more of him for coming weeping to you and lying in his teeth.”

In his now handsome indignation, so much more appealing than his cold contempt, he might have been Sir Galahad. I shook my head to dispel a reluctant admiration.

“But this is you and Chessy, Chip!” I cried, as the full grotesqueness of the situation suddenly struck me. “You and Chessy and a cribbed note, if you like. It's been taken out of the Review. There's nothing left of it! Chessy isn't going to do anything like that again. He only did it, anyway, because you put so much heat on him. Can't you forgive him?”

“It's not a question of forgiveness. We took the pledge to observe the honor code when we came down here. One of the principal duties is to report a violation. And there is no question in my mind that Chessy violated the code when he submitted a paper that was not his.”

“But you caught it in time, darling!”

“Fortunately for Chessy, yes. If it had already been published, I should have had no alternative but to report him.”

“Isn't that what we used to call snitching?”

Chip did not flinch. “That's what we should have called it at Saint Luke's or Yale. But in Virginia they think differently about these matters. The university is full of stories of men turning in their closest friends. I didn't have to come down here, but having come, I certainly intend to abide by their rules.”

I stamped my foot. “I can't see it! Here we are, you and I and Chessy. In a few more months we'll be out of this place. How can you let some crazy code designed by ancient slaveholders control what
we
three do in a matter known only to us?”

“That is your way of looking at it. I've told you mine.”

“But doesn't it kill you, Chip?”

“Kill me?”

“To hurt Chessy this way? Your dearest friend? Who introduced us?”

Chip could quote Shakespeare at the damndest times! He actually smiled now. “‘What? Michael Cassio, that came a-wooing with you?' ”

I saw then that it was hopeless. “You'll be smothering me next,” I muttered. “Like Desdemona.”

I don't know what I might not have done had he not stepped forward just then to take me in his arms. “I know this is hard on you, dearest. And after all, you didn't take the oath. But I did, and you must try to let me live with my conscience.”

I hugged him, sobbing. “But it's such a monster for me to share you with!”

I said no more, because I was a coward. If Chessy threatened to stand between me and my love, I was going to throw Chessy, innocent or guilty, to the dogs. That was simply the way things were. I am afraid that Chip's very ruthlessness, his hard bright honor, as shining as his blue eyes and pale skin, had a strong sexual attraction for me. In life, as in fantasy, I wanted to be held tightly, dominated, suffocated. Yes, like Desdemona!

I did not see Chessy before he left school. He explained to people that he had to move back to Brooklyn to be closer to his mother, who had had a stroke. He transferred without difficulty to New York University Law School. I believe that Mr. Benedict, who was a trustee of that university, provided some assistance at Chip's request. I doubt that Chessy told the true story to anyone, including his wife, though I suppose he must have squared his mother in some fashion to make her feign a temporary ailment. But from what little I knew of Mrs. Bogart, she was putty in her clever son's hands. Certainly Chip never told anyone, so the secret is revealed for the first time on this page.

No, that is not true. I have just remembered that I
did
tell somebody: my mother-in-law. When Chip graduated, she and Mr. Benedict came down to Charlottesville for several days, and she and I took a couple of long walks in the spring countryside. On one of these I told her the story of Chessy and confessed my doubts as to the rectitude of what Chip had done. Mrs. Benedict stopped short and looked at me in surprise.

“But, Alida, what else could he possibly have done? I think he behaved admirably! And with the greatest kindness and consideration, too. I suppose you will not want me to speak to him about it, but otherwise I should offer him my heartiest congratulations!”

“Well, please don't” was all I could murmur. These Benedicts!

A
FTER
C
HIP
married Alida, and before he went down to Charlottesville, he visited the Bank of Commerce on Wall Street to determine exactly what family property had been put in his name and under what conditions. The officer who received him, though polite, was reluctant to impart the whole truth, but under persistent questioning he had no choice but to do so. Chip was not only the absolute owner of a considerable number of securities; he was entitled to the income of a sizable trust fund. These properties had been handled by his father under a power of attorney signed by Chip on his twenty-first birthday. This he now promptly revoked, directing that the income henceforth be remitted to him directly and sending formal notice to his father that he would no longer be responsible for any poor relatives. He would not be rich, he concluded, by Benedict standards, but when he moved to Charlottesville, he would probably be one of the richest students at Virginia Law.

His father invited him to lunch at the Yale Club the very next day. Chip could hardly decline.

“Of course I'll take over the cousins,” Elihu told him with his usual cryptic smile. “But are you sure, my boy, that you're acting in your own best interests? I thought you and I had agreed that I should handle any money settled on you for tax reasons while you were busy being educated.”

“I've changed my mind. That is, if I ever really made it up. From now on, I'll be my own boss.”

“You don't consider that you may hold money that your mother and I gave you in a kind of moral trust?”

“I don't see how a money trust can be moral. But of course I understand what you're driving at. You'd be entirely justified in disinheriting me. Go ahead.”

Elihu, as usual, betrayed no indignation. He simply raised his eyebrows as if he had just received an interesting proposition. “I know that some young people today despise what they consider the ill-gotten gains of their progenitors. But I never heard of an idealist who chose to live off those gains while he reviled the generation that earned them.”

“I'm not reviling anybody, Dad. Nor am I in the least a radical or revolutionary. I simply consider that the money you and Mother settled on me is a fair price for the moral domination you have chosen to exercise over me. I shall probably need every penny of it to pay for the operation of severing that umbilical cord!”

Looking into his father's widened eyes and at his now shriveling smile, he knew that the shaft had gone home. Was the dark pleasure, which was bound to turn into a pain as acute, if not more so, for himself, really worth it? And yet he could not help himself; he knew that he was doomed to strike and strike again.

“I don't care what you say, Chip. I refuse to cut you off. I shan't give you that satisfaction. Now go on down to law school, do one hell of a job there and forget all about your mother and me!”

As if Chip could! The family affection, the family expectations, seemed to permeate the atmosphere around the temporary oases of New Haven and Charlottesville like a coiling miasma. He had cut himself free for the moment, it was true; he was standing on his own two feet. He would have regarded as a sentimental weakness any refusal on his part to use money that had been legally settled on him. But the maintenance of that liberty was still going to be a long and arduous endeavor. It would have been easier had he been allowed to effect, at least during his law school years, a total breach with his parents, but how could he do that in the face of their refusal to take formal offense? He would have seemed shockingly brutal to his whole family, to his friends, to Alida. He had not even been able to prohibit his parents' rare but regular visits. Alida, on whom he had counted for total cooperation, on whose dislike of his mother he had built his hope of alliance, had insisted on inviting them.