Honorable Men (20 page)

As a father Chip left more to be desired, although I believe he did his best according to his own lights. Eleanor never quite recovered from the four years of having no father, and as she grew up her increasingly critical and sometimes surly disposition spurred her on to the political left, where she took stands inimical to all that the Benedicts regarded as gospel. Yet even when she was at her worst, Chip tried to be patient with her, and I used to tire of their endless arguments, in which he tried, with exasperating equanimity, to win her back to a more capitalist way of thinking. With Dana he was more successful, because his son admired him intensely and dreaded disappointing him. It was touching to see the boy walking behind his father on a fishing expedition, carrying his rod and cocking his hat exactly as Chip did. But it was obviously unhealthful that he was so afraid of Chip, and I knew that one day we should have trouble. But why should I have borrowed it?

I cannot say that my understanding of my husband was much more profound than it had been in New Haven and Charlottesville, but I decided—I think on the whole wisely—that a profound understanding between spouses was not essential to a happy marriage. What at least then seemed much more important to me was that I was now an integral part of his active life. I had had little to do with his law career, and nothing with his naval, but the position of the wife of the chairman of the board in a company town is not unlike that of an ambassadress. I was a true partner in my husband's work.

There were not only the many office parties that had to be given and the visiting businessmen who had to be entertained; there were the board meetings of the hospital, the settlement house, the library, even the country club, that had to be attended. If Chip was expected to take over his father's responsibilities, I was no less expected to take over, or at least to share, his mother's. Mrs. Benedict showed no jealousy at my forced inclusion; she seemed ignorant of the very knowledge that most women in her position would have clung to their prerogatives. Her remarkable aptitude and the fact that I welcomed her assistance at all times no doubt eased the situation. I had no ambition to be queen of Benedict; I was sincerely contented to be one of the court.

So much is written about people who can realize their full personalities only by breaking out of an oppressive family or social hierarchy that one is not always aware of how many there are who can accomplish the same thing only by breaking in. The joys of eschewing multiplicity for unity, the thrills of belonging as opposed to escaping, are less celebrated, yet I believe that a sense of being an outsider is at the core of most people's misery. Sometimes their exclusion is obvious, as that of Jews by anti-Semites, or blacks by rednecks, or the untutored and unwashed by the perfumed and cultivated. But actually the sense of not being a true part of a dominant group is almost universal, because it is a state of mind not necessarily reflected in the external facts. A superficial observer, for example, might have thought that Alida Struthers in 1937 was not justified in her acute sense of social inferiority. Had she not been of old Knickerbocker stock, a graduate of Miss Herron's Classes, a nationally known debutante? Perhaps—but what did those things mean to her? To me the important facts were that my father couldn't pay his bills, that my mother was dowdy and pretentious and that both were sneered at by the people who really knew what was what. I could read gossip columns about “lovely blue-blooded Alida Struthers” till the cows came home without altering this.

Now the delightful thing about my social position in Benedict was that it was assured against even the murkiest doubts of my id. There was no questioning the fact that Alida Benedict was looked up to by all. Oh, of course I assumed they made all kinds of cracks behind my back about “gold-digging tramps from the big city,” but neither my origins nor my small deserts could dim my present glory in their envious eyes. Everyone was charming to me—that was the real point—and if Macbeth had been brought up as I had been, he would never have disdained “mouth honor, breath.” But I shouldn't be too cynical. Some of my new friends were no doubt sincere. Everything at the top of the heap isn't necessarily hypocrisy. To tell the truth, there's probably no more of it there than at the bottom.

The happiest thing about my occupations in town and company was that they took some of the heat off my earlier compulsion to know what my husband was doing and thinking. We were embarked on the same journey with presumably the same goals, and I found myself increasingly inclined to accept the evaluation of Chip by his associates as it was continually expressed to me. “What a wonderful man your husband is”
was the kind of laudation to which I became pleasantly accustomed. And it was true. He was a wonderful man—to live with, anyway—considerate, neat, punctual, efficient, shrewd and surprisingly patient. I say “surprisingly,” because one was always aware of how much better
he
would have done the thing, the mishandling of which had given cause for his patience. And if our parties, our summers, our very home life, were all part of the Benedict operation, that did not mean that we had no fun. We had plenty of fun.

And love? Oh, there I go again. Do women who aren't passionately loved ever deserve to be? Chip would probably not have chosen me for his wife had he had it to do over, but how many husbands would? He was as affectionate, as interested, as most spouses. Half the wives in Benedict would have swapped their husbands for him, and not just because he was chairman of the board, either. Even if I was only an appendage to Chip Benedict, wasn't it something to be an appendage? I discovered that there could be an actual satisfaction in putting a collar around my ego, a pretty collar, to be sure, and allow it, like a sleek and manicured poodle, to trot docilely down the avenue after the stately Doberman of Chip's personality. Perhaps I went a bit far in mentally condoning the infidelities that, I suspected, occurred on his business trips. Had I reached the point of abjection where such conduct in my lord and master made him seem even more my lord and master?

I have said that Chip was widely admired in Benedict. He was not universally so. Many of the old-timers felt that he had cheapened the quality of the glass, particularly in tableware, and many deplored his extension of the business into such affiliated lines as porcelain and kitchen products as a debasement of the founder's more concentrated ideal. Some of these also deplored his pro-union policies, suggesting that he was more interested in a political future in Connecticut than in the true welfare of the business. But Chip, at small gatherings of officers and directors where such objections could be discreetly voiced, always denied that there was any basic difference between his policy and that of his late paternal grandfather.

“In the old days it paid to fight the unions,” he would point out. “It no longer does. Labor strife is too expensive, and half the time you lose. The public wants its unions; let it support them. Pay what you have to pay your workers, and add it to the price of your product. If you can—and Benedict still can.”

“You may find a limit to what you can charge for cheap glass,” someone responded.

“I have that in mind. But we haven't reached that point yet. The public is still willing to pay more for less. Welcome to the twentieth century!”

There was also some opposition to Chip in the family. Two of his sisters, Flossie and Elaine, were now married to men who worked for the company, and Margaret, the youngest, still unwed, acted as her father's secretary. All three had developed considerably from the boy-crazy, giggling sillies who had visited us in Charlottesville, but there were times when I almost wished they hadn't.

My two married sisters-in-law offered an interesting contrast in their ways of dealing with husbands who had no money. Flossie, the elder, a big, breathless, emotional, easily hurt woman, had decided that her cool, tight-lipped, rather condescendingly aesthetic spouse, Ted Millbank, was the spiritual superior of all the Benedicts and that the latter were indeed fortunate to be able to supply the money needed to promote his career. But there was a certain element of the Benedict push behind her noisily announced adoption of the Griselda role, and Ted Millbank had been pressured into giving up what might have been an adequate curatorial career in Williamsburg, Virginia, to take over the small glass museum of the Benedict company. Ted had taste and capability, but he had also many of the limitations of the scholar and tended to view the business community as so many Philistines. Regarding the museum as the primary purpose of the glass business, instead of, as it was, a small public relations agency, he and his too vociferously loyal spouse were on an early collision course with Chip.

Elaine, on the other hand, had married a Saint Luke's and Yale classmate of Chip's, Alvin Barnes, who, although his family, formerly rich, had lost all in the depression, had certainly not married for mercenary reasons. Indeed, it was a joke in Chip's family that Alvin had married Elaine to separate her from her money. He was a short square man with a deceptively boyish face and tousled hair, who combined a strong will power and a bad temper with toughness and integrity. He had taken a position at Benedict only at Chip's solicitation, and he insisted that his wife subsist entirely on his salary. Elaine, who had a sunny disposition and a pleasant ability to laugh at her husband without offending him, complied, but I always felt that had Alvin's income proved inadequate, she wouldn't have hesitated to defy him and make use of her own. Elaine, in her own way, was almost as strong as Chip.

The first serious friction between Ted Millbank and my husband occurred on a night when Ted and Flossie came to dinner with us to meet Chip's old commander, Gerald Hastings. The latter, now a rear admiral, and his rather subdued, but eager-to-please, tiny wife were spending the weekend with us. I don't remember just what year it was, but it was before the Soviet Union had attained full parity of nuclear power with the United States, as will be shortly made clear by what happened. I was rather in awe of Hastings because of the deep respect that Chip felt for him, though certainly the flatness of his discourse—at least when he talked to women—was not impressive. That evening, however, he made the whole table sit up when Chip asked him what action he would take, were he President, to counteract the Russian atomic threat.

“Oh, I'm quite clear about that,” Hastings responded in the voice of easy authority that he always knew how to adopt if the conversation became military. “I should do the only sane thing a great nation can do. And which we will probably have only another year or so at most in which
to
do. I should present the Russian authorities with an ultimatum. Either they consent at once to a total dismantlement of all their nuclear plants, subject, of course, to our military supervision, or they take the consequences.”

There was a tense silence around the table.

“And what would those consequences be?” demanded Ted Millbank, in a voice that trembled with anticipatory indignation.

“The consequences would be an atomic attack on their nuclear bases. I have little doubt that we could bring their production to a halt.”

“And what about the people?” Flossie Millbank cried out. “What about the millions of people who would be killed?”

“I daresay it would not be millions. I should limit our strike, insofar as possible, to military targets. But yes, there would certainly be appalling casualties. However, the Russians have only to choose.”

“I never heard anything so barbarous!” Ted exclaimed shrilly. “Of course no proud nation could cave in before so arbitrary an ultimatum. You would give them no choice. It would be genocide!”

“I beg your pardon, sir; it would be just the opposite. We would be saving the human race. For I should send the same ultimatum to any other nation, friendly or not, that was making nuclear arms. My position would be the simplest: that we Americans have brought this terrible weapon into being and that it is our responsibility to ensure that it should never be used. The nations of the world would henceforth have to settle their disputes without resort to nuclear arms.”

“Except for us,” Ted sneered. “Rather an exception, don't you think?”

“It is a high calling to live up to the challenge of civilization,” Hastings continued imperturbably. It was obvious that he had faced such opposition before. “The fact that we alone have the bomb imposes on us the terrible duty of using it to save the world.”

“I agree with Gerry,” Chip put in flatly.

“And do you think for a minute,” Flossie demanded angrily of her brother, “that anyone in our government would go along with this mad idea?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“I agree with Chip that we may lack the guts to do it,” Hastings continued. “But I also believe that in ten years' time everyone at this table will wish to hell we had!”

Chip and the Millbanks did not confine their differences of opinion to international affairs. They found even more explosive territory at home. The glass museum, which had been started as an additional attraction to the glass-blowing for the increasing number of summer tourists who passed through Benedict on their way north, had grown, thanks largely to Matilda Benedict's interest, from a couple of rooms of Colonial bowls and tumblers to a small but exquisite Palladian pavilion that was on its way to demonstrating the whole history of glass-making from Roman days through Venice right down to Tiffany and John La Farge. But now Ted had conceived a greater plan. He wanted to show the use of glass in architecture, in medicine, even in warfare. He wanted to suggest a world where glass was God !

Chip had asked me to be present when the museum committee, consisting of Ted Millbank, his wife and mother-in-law, were to present his master plan. We met in Chip's office, which occupied the whole of the blue dome on top of the administration building, with four great oval windows that commanded views of the town and the countryside. Chip's round desk stood in the middle of the chamber in the center of a round blue carpet. The tables and shelves along the walls were covered with specimens of glasswork, including some huge unshaped pieces of ruby red and emerald green. Ted had spread his plans out on the floor, and we walked about, perusing them.