Honorable Men (8 page)

“It was your idea.”

“And I had a ready pupil! Boy, how ready!”

Chip left him without another word. Chessy was like one of those little devils in the choir screen at Albi whose job it was to prod the damned with pitchforks. It was not his fault; it was his function. Chessy at length accepted the situation with a shrug and found his way to more hospitable cubicles.

Chip now had no close friends, but he found some relief in his semi-isolation. Without intimates he had no spies; without spies he could, in his own way, relax and learn to live with the grim but silent companion of a guilt that he knew now would never leave him.

Listening to his grandfather's sermons, watching the sunlight through clouds making first jewels and then dark blobs of the scarlet and green robes and turbans in the great west window, he would find himself lulled into a kind of torpor by the mellifluous phrases.

“There are those today, boys, who will tell you that a man is not truly the master of his being. The thief, they will maintain, cannot help reaching his hand into another's pocket; the adulterer is the prey of his own lust; even the murderer is propelled helplessly towards his victim by a rage that overpowers him. Our leaning to sin is a compulsion, like alcoholism or drug addiction. But always remember this, boys. Those who argue thus seek to deprive you of your own free will, of your very soul! For without sin, how can there be virtue? Without the struggle, where is the reward? Any man can do anything that he wills to do. What is an alcoholic but one who has chosen to destroy his will? But if he has destroyed it, must he not once have had it to destroy?”

Towards the end of March a sluggish spring brought mud puddles to the campus, and a white sky made the bare branches of the elms seem like bones. The winter had been so long and cold that it seemed too late for leaves. The boys were bored, the masters irritable, the wait for spring had become interminable. And then the one thing that everybody hungered for occurred: a scandal.

It had long been recognized by the more experienced members of the faculty, and even imparted to some of the sixth-formers who acted as monitors with semidisciplinary powers over their juniors, that Mr. B had to be insulated from certain campus misdemeanors of which he took too somber a view. Mr. B was a saint, it was conceded, but saints were sometimes impracticable. Taking the name of the Lord in vain, for example, and smoking were practices so common in many of the families from which the boys came that expulsion on their account, or even suspension, might have made the school ridiculous to the New England academic world. Accordingly, it was tacitly understood by the disciplinarians at Saint Luke's that swearing or smoking would be punished without being reported to the headmaster. Any boy, it was felt, who uttered an oath in Mr. B's hearing, or took a puff in his presence, was too great a fool to be protected. And to some extent sexual offenses fell into this category. A master or monitor might learn to look the other way if he suspected activities that amounted only to masturbation. Sodomy and oral sex, however, were different matters. Yet there was no such uniformity among the faculty in this area as in that of swearing and smoking, and if a young idealistic master happened to bump into even the mildest form of Mr. B's “dirty things,” the fat might be in the fire.

Unhappily for Chessy Bogart, just such a master was on duty in his dormitory when a boy was reported sick during the night. Hurrying to the cubicle of the afflicted student, young Mr. Boyd, a devout teacher of sacred studies, ill-guided by his pocket flashlight, entered the wrong cubicle and discovered Chessy in bed with another boy. It was only too evident even to his chaste vision what they were doing, and the next morning every boy at Saint Luke's knew that the two culprits had been summoned to Mr. B's office.

Chip, who as a fifth-former had his own study, went there during an hour's break between classes to avoid the gossip. He knew that at least a dozen other boys had been involved in the same activity in that dormitory, and he wanted to avoid the feverish speculation as to whether other “arrests” were likely to follow. He felt a sudden calmness and clearheadedness. Now that all the world was mad, it was perhaps time to be sane. He had a curious sense that the worst was behind him, that he had, to some extent anyway, been through his purgatory. He even suspected that there might be offered to him an unusual way to redeem himself. When the inevitable knock came to his door, he was ready for it. He even had a moment to reflect that his pulse was actually normal.

“Charles, are you there? May I come in?”

“Come in, sir.”

Never before at school, except in his grandfather's own office, had he been addressed by the headmaster as “Charles.” The door opened, and the little man, very grave but somehow not formidable, came in.

“Let me sit here by your desk, Charles.” The voice was kinder than Chip had ever heard it. The deep, deep eyes were fixed on him. “I suppose you have heard what has happened. Two boys in your dormitory were caught by Mr. Boyd doing things with each other that no decent boy would do. I have no wish to be more specific. The boys will be expelled. That is not why I am here. I am here because one of them, Bogart, told me he had done nothing that others had not done. Oh, he was very bold about it! He declared that if I were logical, I should expel half the school. He even went so far, Charles, as to imply that he had done these things with you. Is that true? Have I been living in a fool's paradise?”

Chip felt almost lightheaded in the rush of his sudden assurance. “It is not true, sir.”

There was not even a flicker of relief in that steadfast gaze. “I didn't believe him for a minute. It was obvious that the wretched boy thought that I would never expel my grandson and therefore would, morally, not be able to expel him. He was wrong, of course. I would have expelled a grandson who had done what he had done. But that need not detain us further. I want you to go to my house, Charles, and remain there until the two boys have left the campus.”

“May I ask why, sir?”

“Because I am afraid you might be tempted to beat up Bogart. I can understand how a clean young man would react to so base an accusation.”

Chip rose with his grandfather and walked with him to the shingle house behind the chapel that was the headmaster's home. And that was all.

There were no repercussions. It became known that Chessy had tried to implicate Chip, but his motive was obvious, and no one saw any reason to disbelieve the denial. Chip seemed to have been cleared by the very gods themselves.

There were times when he wondered whether a drama so inner had any reality. Each week that passed made his nocturnal experience with Chessy seem less true. And as for his lie, what good would the truth have done his partner in evil?
He had saved the peace of mind of his parents and possibly the very life of Mr. B. For he had felt at last the full weight of the old man's love.

There was a distinct change thereafter in the way Mr. B treated him. He never called him “Benedict” now, even in class, but always “Charles.” It was as if Chip had passed through his period of probation, triumphantly, and could be recognized before the world as the staff on which the aging headmaster would confidently lean. Teachers and boys both seemed to sense this, and as Chip, gaining confidence, and even a kind of happiness, took in the new friendliness of the campus, he became popular. When at the end of the spring term he was elected head monitor for his second and final year, the gratified headmaster wrote his daughter that he could now sing his Nunc Dimittis.

But, for all his pride in his only grandson, Mr. B's health failed rapidly during Chip's final year at school. It was felt by the senior masters that the tall, blond youth who presided so serenely at assembly, who read the lesson in chapel with such admirable clarity and seriousness, who administered justice to the younger boys with such humanity and understanding, was a kind of gray eminence to the declining chief. It was to Chip that they came before presenting some delicate problem to Mr. B—the need to relax an outdated rule, the question of a new privilege sought by the boys and already granted by other schools—and Chip would explain the matter tactfully to his grandfather, who seemed quite willing now to relax his clung-to prejudices in favor of this new enlightenment.

The announcement of Mr. B's retirement was scheduled to be made at Chip's graduation, which would almost have made it an occasion of too much sentiment. At any rate it was not to be, for the old man had a stroke a month before Prize Day and lingered only a week, immobile and hardly able to articulate a word. As the end approached, Matilda Benedict relinquished the post by her father's bedside that she had occupied for three days and most of three nights and indicated to Chip that he should hold his grandfather in his arms for the last minutes.

Mr. B tried to touch Chip's head, perhaps to bless him, and then expired, whispering a name that was presumably his.

Afterwards, Chip's mother followed him into the next room, where she found him sobbing brokenly.

“But, my darling boy, you must try to remember that you made him happy!” she cried, almost in surprise at such violent emotion. “Happy as nobody else ever made him. Even my own mother!”

“And yet I did something for which he would have expelled me, had he known.”

Neither Matilda nor her husband was ever able to extract from their son another syllable as to what this act had been. They concluded that it must have been a prank that his natural grief for the old man had blown out of all proportion.

C
HIP AT
Y
ALE
began to believe that it might be possible to become the master of his own destiny. In the larger view of life that emancipation from boarding school opened to him, he was able at last to fit his parents into his background in such a way as not wholly to obliterate it. He even thought that he was learning to understand them, and with this prospect there came a kind of compassion. After all, they certainly meant well, at least according to their own lights, and if they were unable to see the beauty in all the pleasures of life, the beauty in what they called sin, it might be sage to remember that they, too, had had parents.

The great thing for him to accept, as he now saw it, was himself. His heart, his mind, his body, composed the donnee of his life. If these should not be adequate for the role of Charles Benedict as Elihu and Matilda conceived it, then that might simply be too bad. If people found him attractive, if people wanted to fuss over him, where was the harm? They were probably making a mistake, but that was their lookout. “Chip loves Chip; that is, ‘I am I,' ” he paraphrased Richard III. Was he good? Was he bad? He had first to find out
what
he was. Free will, if it existed at all, would have to wait.

He declined to confine himself to his classmates at Saint Luke's and those of its long-time athletic rival, Chelton; these were too cliquish for his taste; and he found the men from Hotchkiss, Andover and Choate more interested in the college as a whole than in the common denominator of their own social backgrounds. It was perfectly true, as he pointed out to his roommate, Lars Alversen, that their group was entirely prep school, but so long as it included the men who ran the
News,
the Political Union and the fraternities, might it not be an adequate cross section? Would it not be artificial to go about canvassing men from high schools or on scholarships? Or would it? Chip was not sure. He still worried about being a snob.

Lars cited the man across the hall who, in his determination to know every member of their class, had posted a list on his wall and checked off each name as he met its owner. Lars, leery of anything in excess, dubbed him an egregious ass.

“But don't those people get results?” Chip asked earnestly. “Can you really accomplish anything in life if you're not willing to make a bit of an ass of yourself?”

Yale, at any rate, kept filling his life with pleasant things. He was on the
News',
he sang with the Wiffenpoofs; he rode on the Berkeley crew; he joined Zeta Xi; and his grades promised him Phi Beta Kappa. He was majoring in English, which everybody seemed to agree was the best preparation for law, and he enjoyed Chauncey Tinker's emotional disquisitions on the British Romantic poets and Johnny Berdan's more trenchant analysis of Pope. His friends confidently predicted that in the spring of junior year he would be tapped for Bulldog, the most coveted of the senior societies.

There was one member of his class, however, whose company he never sought. Chessy Bogart and he nodded to each other when they passed on campus or met in class, but that was all. Chessy, since Saint Luke's, had turned into something of an intellectual as well as a dandy; he was an editor of the
Lit
and wore black suits that fitted him too tightly. He let it be known that a maternal uncle had made a shady fortune in the Argentine and, being childless, had conceived the fancy of taking the dentist's son under his wing. Chessy had boldness and wit; he knew how and when to make up to people. He never thrust himself on Chip, but neither did he avoid him. There was always a touch of derision, a bit of a sneer, in his casual greeting.

Chip did not resent this. There was even a small, bizarre relief at the reappearance of the little devil with the prodding pitchfork; once he knew where he was, he didn't have to keep looking around for him. It might almost be a game to see whether this imp, whose function it presumably was to know his victim's secrets, would discover what none of Chip's friends had found out: that he paid a monthly visit to an expensive private brothel maintained by a group of businessmen in a brownstone on West Seventieth Street in Manhattan.

Chip had been introduced to this “club” by an older first cousin, Peter Duvinock, a nephew of his father and the son of the critical aunt who had spoken so sneeringly of Chip's mother's “great match.” Peter, who bitterly resented that Uncle Elihu had found him too slow for the family business and had placed him in the Wall Street bank that handled the Benedict trusts, had conceived of the idea of revenging himself by corrupting the family's Galahad. He had been taken aback, however, by Chip's ripeness for debauchery. His younger and richer cousin had promptly become a regular customer of the establishment and had demonstrated his gratitude by offering to help his initiator with the very stiff dues. Peter had to concede that his mother's beautiful nephew was a lot less naive than he appeared and treated him thereafter with a noticeable increase of respect.