Honorable Men (28 page)

He was not sorry to leave New York. He had discovered what he had not been wholly surprised to discover: that the fiduciary of a charitable institution, in the absence of an administrative crisis, was expected only to give or raise money. This, however, had been acceptable to him, and he had thrown himself into the job with all of his energy. What he had been less willing to accept was the tendency to vulgarization in the arts and sciences. Culture had become “big business,” with big shows for bigger crowds, and Chip had begun to feel that he might as well be back in the glass business, making shabbier products for higher prices under Elihu's disapproving eye. The fact that that eye had been removed to a higher sphere would not have made it less disapproving.

What was it but another confirmation that the world was made up of alloy? That the poor Albigenses, whose brutal extinction he had deplored as a boy in Albi Cathedral, had been right, and that the creating force had built whatever was out of badness? How could he escape the conclusion when he saw all around him the ineluctable evolution of nobility into fatuity?

He had overstated his case for the war, deliberately, to the children. Certainly he had little enthusiasm for its continuance. Common sense and discretion called for an early pullout. But so long as the powers that were had decided against it, was it a crime to get a kick—all right, call it just that!—out of hacking at the green scaly neck that bore the head of the dragon? Gerry Hastings had said the enemy was a state of mind. Well, surely Moscow and Hanoi were aspects of that state. If there was value in nothing but the opposition to evil, at least one could oppose!

In his first six months at the Department he was so busy that it hardly mattered whether or not Alida moved to Washington. His existence seemed to have changed from a slow silent movie to a hectic newsreel. He had to read every intelligence report from every embassy, consulate and military post in Southeast Asia; he had to peruse every letter volunteered from a traveler or businessman. He was sent on a flying trip to Singapore, Bangkok and Saigon. When he was not reading, he was dictating, endlessly turning out memoranda on different ways of justifying the American presence. In Washington he worked nights and often weekends. His life had become a blur of airports, uniforms, jeeps and long, shiny limousines, of gravely shaking heads bent over maps, of paper, paper, paper.

Alida did at last come down to Georgetown, but she kept the New York apartment and spent more than half of every month in it. She had given up her job with Eleanor because of her nervous tension over Dana, and she said that she could not survive without her bridge sessions. Her drinking was now so much worse that any social life was out of the question. After a few cocktails she would denounce the war in terms that made it desirable that none of his associates be present. Having at first tried to loosen her ties to Manhattan, Chip now began to look forward to her departures to the north.

His only real friend was his secretary, with whom he spent most of his time. Violet Crane was twenty-nine, with a fine full figure, strong features, curly blond hair and sympathetic, yellow-tan eyes through which radiated a character so warm as to make her everybody's friend. She had a tendency to be disorganized in small matters, mislaying her purse, leaving her coat in the cafeteria, always forgetting her cigarettes. But her work was first-rate, and she was willing to put in any number of hours.

Chip soon discovered that her background was not unlike Alida's. She was listed in the New York Social Register, but she had no income other than what she earned.

“Mummie likes to call us
nouveaux pauvres,”
she told him on the first night that he took her out to dinner after work. “But it seems to me we're rather
vieux
in that
galère.
You have to go back a couple of generations to find the first butler.”

“What made you join the Department? It can't have been, at your age, an impassioned belief in the war.”

“No, although I'm certainly not opposed. What do I really know about it? I leave those things to the Special Assistant.”

“That's more than his children do.”

“Ah, but I feel sorry for them! They're going to regret having been so disagreeable to you. I read an interview with your daughter at the time you took the post. It wasn't really a bit nice. But she'll grow out of it.”

“She's the same age as you, Violet.”

“I guess I feel older because I didn't have a father. At least one who was available. Someday your daughter will know how blessed she's been.”

There was a candor in her tone that barred any suspicion of insincerity. Yet he couldn't help asking, “You're not just being nice to the boss?”

“Why shouldn't I be nice to him? He's a very good boss.”

When he stopped his car by her apartment house, she behaved perfectly. She didn't hurry to get out to avoid the possibility of his seeking to come up; she appeared not even to envisage the possibility of a vulgar finale to their evening. She sat for a moment, straight upright, like a little girl in pink satin about to leave dancing school. Then she turned and said, with a quaintly natural formality, “Thank you, Mr. Benedict, for my pleasant evening. I much enjoyed it.”

“Am I too old to be called Chip?”

She considered this, her head to one side. “Certainly not too old. That's ridiculous. But I think it had better be Mr. Benedict in the office. Good night, Chip.”

It was a warm spring, and Alida had been in New York for three weeks running. When he asked Violet for dinner in his garden by the pool, she accepted, again without embarrassment, but when she arrived and discovered there was no Mrs. Benedict, she seemed for a moment nonplused. And then, taking in the little oval pool and the small garden of rhododendrons, she suddenly clapped her hands.

“How lovely it all is!”

“Alida is in New York. Let me say at once, Violet, that Alida is usually in New York. That's beginning to be the way things are.”

“What a shame!”

“I suppose so. But it needn't keep us from having a pleasant dinner together, need it?”

“Why on earth should it?”

There had been an idea that they would do some work after dinner, but with the second Martini Chip dismissed it. He was having too good a time. Violet, it was true, was less at ease than she had been at the restaurant, for his invitation on that night could have been attributed to simple friendliness, whereas a dinner at home without his wife had all the aspects of a proposed affair. But she too was obviously enjoying herself, and she seemed determined not to spoil any minute of their evening by a fussy or prudish concern over how it might end. She talked with animation and humor about herself and her life, but only in answer to his questions.

“You're like Alida,” he commented. “Old New York.”

“Not really. I'm Hungarian and not even very old HungarÂ
ian. My real name is Belik. My father was some sort of a count, or at least he claimed he was. He came to New York in the early years of the depression and thought he'd found a permanent meal ticket in Mummie. And he might have, too, if he hadn't mistreated her so.”

“What did he do? Beat her?”

“I don't know. She never talks about it. She simply shivers if you mention his name. I guess he was pretty bad, but then she's pretty timid. It must have been a hopeless match from the beginning. Sometimes, when Mummie's being a bit too ‘old New York,' as you put it, I feel a sneaking sympathy for him.”

He thought he could make out the hint of a muscular male Hungarian parent in her strong, well-shaped limbs. But anything mean or brutal in Count Belik had certainly circumvented her.

“So she divorced him?”

“Well, her family did that for her. She hid away with me and my brother until a settlement was made. Father was willing enough to sell us for a good slice of her tiny fortune.”

“He didn't mind your giving up his name?”

“Why should he have? It probably wasn't his real one. So we took Mother's and never saw him more. But surely all this can't interest you.”

“It does, Violet. I want to hear your whole story.”

“Really? You mean, the boss should know? What more can I tell you?”

“How you were brought up.”

“In an old-fashioned apartment hotel. They weren't so dear in those days. I shared the bedroom with Mummie, and Brian had a maid's room. It was on Central Park West, not fashionable, of course, but we went to fashionable schools, Brian to Buckley, for a while anyway, and I to Brearley. And all the summers we spent with Granny Crane in her little cottage on Washington Street in Newport. Oh, yes, we were always genteel! Only it took a good deal of effort to keep up with the richer cousins. Well, not keep
up
with them—that was impossible—but keep enough in sight so that we wouldn't be forgotten and might sometimes be asked to parties.”

“But you went to college?”

“Yes, an aunt sent me to Vassar. Oh, I have nothing to complain about. I enjoyed my youth. If only Mummie had been a bit stronger! But she was always such a white scared little thing, huddled over her bric-a-brac, dreaming how different her life might have been if she'd never met Father.”

“Couldn't she have married again?”

“You don't know her! She felt that a lifetime of expiation would hardly make up for the trouble she had caused her parents. And for just one misstep! How could it have happened? she must have always asked herself. How could she not have married a nice bunny rabbit like herself? What fiend had placed that Hungarian in her path?”

Chip, leaning back on the settee, sipping his drink, felt a pleasant calm slipping about him, like a silk kimono draped by competent hands over his shoulders and back.

“What about your brother? Did he turn out all right?”

“Alas, no. It may have been the trauma of the divorce. Or maybe there was some terrible scene; I don't know. Father had ghastly standards of how masculine a boy should be. He may even have beat him. Anyway, Brian was a nervous wreck. He never could get through any school or college, and he's been in the Stauffer Psychiatric Clinic in Worcester for five years now. I sometimes wonder if he'll ever get out.”

“That must cost your mother a pretty penny.”

“It takes every one she's got! Each year we have to sell something new, the Kensett, the Copley. Soon there won't be anything left. Thank God there's a small Crane trust that Mummie can't touch. But what am I saying?” She put a hand to her lips in dismay. “You'll think I'm looking for a handout!”

“Violet, please, don't be gross. What I don't see, with all this sadness, is how you ever got away.”

“To Washington? It was that same aunt. She's Mummie's sister and a perfect darling, not at all like Mummie, ever so much stronger. She told me to give up my job at Scribner's and get out of town. She said it was my only chance.”

“She was quite right.”

“When I told her I couldn't leave Mummie, she insisted. She promised me she'd look in on her every day. And so I finally decided to come down here.”

At dinner he told her about the Benedicts and about Alida, Eleanor and Dana. He told her that his marriage was really over, which he had not acknowledged to himself until then. They drank a bottle of wine and then a good deal of brandy, but he noted with approval, when he drove her home, that she was sober. They said good night in the same way that they had done before, but he knew, and he was passably sure that she knew, that it would not be so on the next evening they spent together.

Nor was it. He had sent the couple off for the weekend, and he and Violet had the house to themselves for two days and nights. She gave herself to love with a freedom and a gaiety that he found delightful. She was not totally inexperienced in the art—she told him that she had had one other affair, three years earlier, with a married literary agent that had lasted a year—but Chip suspected that her partner had been clumsy, for she seemed amazed and exhilarated at what he aroused in her. The only thing that disturbed him was that she was obviously very much in love, but she seemed at the same time to sense that this would disturb him, that it might spoil their “idyll,” like a whiff of bad breath or some revelation of coarseness. She gave the appearance of making light of their lovemaking—or of trying to—by keeping her terms of affection moderate and half-humorous. It was as if she were watching him out of the corner of her eye to be sure that her remarks were in tune with his.

“You needn't take me home,” she announced on Sunday night. It had been agreed that she would leave before the couple returned. “I'll get a cab, and if not, I can walk. It's a lovely night.”

“But my car's right outside. It'll take me only ten minutes.”

“Please, Chip!” There was a sudden note of near panic in her tone.

“But, Violet, my dear, what's wrong?”

“Because I know you want to work! And because if I'm an importunate bitch, you'll give me up. And I don't want you to give me up. Not just yet, anyway. Oh, of course, you'll have to, in time. You have a whole other life—I know that. But I do want a little more of you first. Oh, yes, I do!”

And she almost ran out the door.

At the office her conduct was perfect. Never by anything so vulgar as even a private wink did she suggest that their relationship had changed. She was as pleasant as ever, possibly a touch more businesslike, and she seemed determined to work even harder than before. Only when it was time to quit did she, by her instant acquiescence with any plan he offered, betray the fact that she had placed her every minute at his disposal. He was convinced that if he did not take her out, she would spend the evening alone in her room. The completeness with which he had all at once filled her life was disconcerting. But what could he do about it if she never complained?