Honorable Men (7 page)

Yes, Chip saw this. And he heard enough of what was said in the locker rooms and after lights in the dormitory to know that the heated luxury of private fantasies that seemed at times about to burst the very walls of his head apart was not peculiar to him. Yet he still suspected that his visions were filthier, his Venusberg more obscene. It was true that Mr. B in sacred studies had scoffed at the Calvinist idea that a man could be saved or damned at birth. Mr. B was saved; there was no question about that; but did those who were saved necessarily know those who were not?

The headmaster himself took note of his grandson's escapes to solitude with a gentle but definite concern.

“You read many novels, Charles,” he observed at one of their sessions. “Are you seeking something in fiction? Or do you simply like a good yarn?”

“I think I like, sir, to be taken out of myself for a bit.”

“Well, that's understandable. A school is so full of ringing bells and barking masters that a boy must wish to get away from time to time. But stories can be an evasion. They can even be a kind of drug. I don't suggest that in your case they are. I simply put the idea on the table.”

“Mr. Terhune, in English class last week, described Saint Luke as our first novelist. He said he was the author of the Acts as well as of his own Gospel.”

Mr. B seemed to weigh this. “That is believed by many scholars. The style is similar and certainly very beautiful. But I trust Mr. Terhune did not suggest that Saint Luke
invented
his Gospel.”

“Oh, no, sir! He said it was more like an historical novel.”

“Oh, I see.”

Chip had had a vague notion that if he could find a novel in the New Testament, it might bring Gospels into a relation with the fiction that he was reading and that this relation might somehow be used to bridge the gap between his grandfather's pure visions and the boys in the locker room. But now he saw that Mr. B was not going to allow this. There was no bridging that gap. It yawned like outer space between the sun and bipeds on the earth's surface.

And then there occurred a violent episode that emphasized even more strongly the separate worlds in which he and his grandfather were destined to move. Chip was too strong and agile to have much trouble with boys who liked to implement even a passing hostility with their fists, and on the rare occasions when he had been so challenged he had acquitted himself in a manner that did not invite others. Indeed, it was felt by some that he did too well. The moment he realized that the wrong was on the other side, he gave in to a sudden eruption of violent rage that had a kind of joy to it. On one occasion he even had to be pulled off his opponent by the alarmed spectators. But in the Stratton affair he was not challenged, personally. He was a volunteer.

It happened in the gymnasium shower room. Stratton, a shy, inhibited boy who too obviously destested public nudity, was being made cruel fun of by a rowdy group of his formmates, who pretended to see in him a naked female intruding on the scene of their ablutions. When the intensity of his embarrassment caused him to have an erection, which he sought desperately to cover, his towel was snatched away, and he was pelted with bars of soap. At this point Chip intervened. By the end of the scuffle one boy, whose head Chip had bashed against the tile wall of the shower room, had to be taken to the infirmary, and Chip that evening found himself alone with his grandfather in the latter's study.

“I am sure you will be relieved to hear, Charles, that Johnson has not had a concussion. Will you tell me, please, how this unseemly brawl began?”

“They were being mean to Stratton, sir. I thought I'd better help him.”

“How were they being mean to Stratton?”

“I'm afraid I can't tell you, sir.”

“I see.” How those pale gray eyes stared! Was it conceivable that Mr. B could visualize such things? No, it was not conceivable. “Why, Charles, did you feel that you had to help him?”

“They were being very bad, sir.”

“But is it your function to correct badness? Shouldn't you have called a prefect or master?”

“But that would have been snitching!”

“Sometimes it may be manly to snitch.”

“Anyway, sir, there wasn't time.”

After a considerable silence Mr. B continued gravely, “Why is it, my boy, that you feel compelled to correct so violently the badness in others?”

“I don't know, sir.”

“Is it possible, do you suppose, that you may be seeking to correct some badness in yourself?”

“I don't know, sir,” Chip repeated, miserably.

Mr. B's sigh seemed to indicate that he gave it up. “Well, remember, please, that you are strong. Think, before you raise your hand to another, that you may hurt him sorely. I do not wish, Charles, to hear of another incident like this.”

When the great west window in the chapel, showing the warrior saints in all their fiery glory, Saint Joan, Saint George, Saint Louis, and the fighting kings, David, Joshua, Saul, was dedicated to the memory of the twenty Saint Luke's boys who had perished in the Great War, Mr. B, who had shared their hell as an army chaplain, was particularly eloquent.

“It is not fashionable today to say there is a right or a wrong side in war, much less to claim that God Himself ever chooses sides. But I impenitently believe that God
was
with the Allies in 1917. It was my privilege to have been at the front with our boys and I knew He was with us! It was not that grave wrongs had not been perpetrated by the Allied Nations in dealing with their empires and with other countries. But when our troops went over the top to stem the advance of German aggression,
then,
at that point anyway, boys, God was with us! You couldn't have been there, you couldn't have seen what they did and how they died, without feeling it! Oh, true, God never forgot the Germans, and He loves them, too—every bit as much as He loves us—but He didn't want them to win!”

At that moment Chip wished that he could have been one of those boys who had fought and died in France. So brave an ending might have redeemed him. For surely among the millions who had perished in the mire of the trenches there must have been some who had burned with his lusts: lust for naked girls, lust for naked boys, lust for self; and afflicted with his doubts: doubts of Mummie, doubts of Daddy, doubts of God. He had no doubts of Mr. B, but wasn't Mr. B an innocent? What did he know of hell?

C
HIP HAD
an initial distrust of the boys from New York City, who made up almost half his class, but it was a feeling that he could relax in favor of any individual who proved to be friendly. He had been brought up not to accept the superior airs of the big city; his parents had always emphasized that to hail from Benedict was every bit as good as being one of the teeming millions of Manhattan, if not better. Nor was this simply a question of being a bulky frog in an exiguous puddle. It was a question of living in a fine, clean, God-fearing town, surrounded by a beautiful countryside and blessed with breathable air, as opposed to a gray metropolis reeking with false pride and falser values. And, anyway, the Benedicts could call themselves New Yorkers, if it came to that; the company maintained a floor in a hotel on Madison Avenue where they could stay whenever they wished.

But New Yorkers had a horrid way of making people feel like hicks; Chester “Chessy” Bogart was a perfect example of this. He came from undistinguished origins—he was a scholarship boy—and although an adequate athlete on the rare occasions when he chose to be, he was short, with a square bulldog countenance, thick black hair and malicious, grinning dark eyes. Yet his self-confidence was supreme; he made fun of everybody and fought like a tiger when his victims tried to beat him up. He sneered at all the accepted school values, used filthy language and earned the grudging respect of some of his classmates by the graphic way in which he described how he had “had” two girls at a summer camp when he was only fourteen.

His mocking overture of friendship to Chip was certainly unconventional: “I guess you're the kind of guy my old man sent me here to meet. Handsome, wealthy and aristocratic!”

Chip was mildly shocked. He had been reared to believe that it was vulgar to refer to people's money. And if you did, you said they were “rolling,” never “wealthy.”

“Why is Benedict any more aristocratic than Bogart?” he demanded.

“It isn't. But God knows what we were before we were Bogarts. And now brace yourself, Tarzan. My old man's a dentist. And a dentist in Brooklyn, too! I guess the trustees like to use some of their scholarship pennies to give this joint a flavor of democracy. Not too much, of course. Just the right amount.”

Chip did not think that his parents would take to Chessy, but hadn't they sent him to Saint Luke's to meet “different sorts of boys”? He decided to let Chessy join him on weekend bird walks, though the latter seemed to care very little for birds. He did care, however, about sex, and he talked of it with an openness that Chip found exciting. So long as he did not have to respond—and Chessy was perfectly willing to do all the talking—he thought it might be less wicked. Chessy was particularly vivid about the monastic aspects of school life.

“What sense does it make to lock us up here, months at a time, with no woman under forty allowed to set foot on campus, except some guy's sappy kid sister for Sunday lunch? I ask you, Tarzan, have you ever seen such a collection of bilious crones as our cleaning women? They say your grandfather inspects each candidate for the job. That old boy must have a depth of concupiscence to spot so precisely the attributes in a female that would make the most sex-starved boy vomit!”

“I wish you'd leave my grandfather out of it,” Chip retorted. “And I wish you wouldn't call me Tarzan.”

“It's only a pet name. And only in private. I like you, Benedict. You're naïve, but you're straight. Which not many guys in this snob academy are.”

Chip was touched in spite of himself. “I like you, too, Chessy.”

“Good. Maybe we'll make something of it. What else do they offer us here?”

“I don't think I follow you.”

“Oh, yes, you do, Tarzan. Yes, you do! You'll be ready for a chimpanzee before the winter's out. Hell, your grandfather can rumble on till the cows come home about ‘doing dirty things,' but if he doesn't let somebody out of this place from time to time, or let somebody in, he can take the consequences. He was young himself once. He ought to know.”

Chip did not respond to this, and the following weekend he arranged to be too busy in the gym for their walk. Yet he was appalled to find his imagination aflame with the idea of “doing dirty things” with Chessy. At times the erotic images that filled his mind would be so vivid as to make concentration in the classroom impossible, and on one occasion he failed to respond to a master until the latter had thrice called his name.

“Come, Benedict, daydreams, daydreams! The Christmas holidays with all your little girl friends will come around soon enough!”

The class tittered, but Chessy's smile was a leer.

And then one night Chessy slipped into his cubicle and tried to get into his bed.

“Get out of here!” Chip whispered fiercely and swung at him. Chessy dodged, snickered and returned to his own cubicle.

After this Chip withdrew from all close association with his erstwhile friend. They greeted each other when they passed in the corridors, and they sometimes walked in company from the chapel to the schoolhouse, but Chip kept the conversations brief and impersonal and avoided any reference to the cubicle episode. Chessy, though, seemed to divine that such reticence must mark a major temptation. He would sneak up behind Chip and hiss in his ear: “You know you want it just as much as I do, Tarzan. Why hold out?”

The riveting, humiliating idea that his weakness had been uncovered, that for all his outer fortitude it was apparent to Chessy that he yearned for another visit to his cubicle, that “Tarzan” was a fraud and a phony who feverishly pined to do everything Chessy wanted to do, ultimately exhausted him. Nothing at last seemed worth the tension in which he lived. The next time Chessy came to his cubicle, he allowed him to slip into his bed.

***

The peculiar horror of the next weeks was that Chip could not seem to focus steadily for more than a few minutes at a time on what had happened, with the result that the shock of his guilt was a constantly repeated blow. He would be walking in the morning to chapel, or returning from the gymnasium against a reddening sky, or ascending the broad varnished stairway to the dormitory to don the stiff collar and tie required for supper, and he would feel a gasp of hope, as if, sinking in the ocean, he had just grasped the spar of safety, or, awakening from a nightmare, he had felt the blessed damp beads of relief on his brow, only to have the spar collapse, the illusion vanish, and know that he was doomed. The present was hopelessly spoiled, and also the future, even the years at Yale that his father had always assured him should be the happiest of his life.

Chessy was astonished at the violence of his friend's reaction. When Chip told him, the morning after the episode in the cubicle, that they must no longer be friends, he protested vigorously, running after Chip's retreating figure and grabbing him by the arm.

“Look, don't be an ass. It didn't mean anything. It's just till we get home and can see girls. Isn't it better than masturbating?”

Chip looked at him in horror. “I don't want to talk about it. I'm going to treat it as if it never happened. Maybe it didn't. Maybe it really didn't!”

“You mean we just dreamed it?”

“Yes!”

“You must be crazy!”

“It would kill my parents. If you ever breathe a word of it, I'll swear you're a liar!”

Chessy whistled. “Breathe a word of it? Do you think I'm proud of it?”