Matters of Honor (12 page)

I bet you think I was shooting from the hip, as usual. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time. I don’t know whether I’m right or even whether it’s a respectable theory, but it makes sense to me. The repression of disagreement and new ideas—with the Inquisition and the way the Church clamped down on science. Protestants weren’t the only target. Humanistic ideals that had propelled the Renaissance were also repressed. Anyway, after the Romain Rolland incident I once again thought I was out of the woods. But right away the ambassador returned to the subject of Poland, and it wasn’t to discuss personal experiences. Far from it. He wanted my views on the problem of Jews who wouldn’t or couldn’t assimilate, not just the very religious Orthodox or Hasidic Jews, but also the ignorant lower class that spoke Yiddish and wouldn’t learn the national language. An intractable problem, he said, very tough for the governments in Poland and Romania. Maybe he mentioned Hungary too. And for the nationalist Christian populations of those countries. I didn’t answer, so he asked me whether I had been brought up speaking Yiddish. No, I said. But you speak it? he said in this very thin voice with an accent like May Standish’s. You get the feeling that he picks each word up with tweezers and examines it before actually opening his mouth. No, I said again.

Ah, he says, you were brought up in a Polish-speaking culturally Polish family.

I nodded.

That confirmed, believe it or not, he asked whether, in view of my secular education, I agreed with his assessment that these unassimilated hordes—I’m not making it up, he said unassimilated hordes—were a problem that, like it or not, called for a solution.

By this time I was furious, and I no longer cared about the Hornungs and their Dutch art, and whether they would throw me out of their house. So I asked him why in his opinion the wise people who didn’t like unassimilated Jews had locked them up in ghettos—before they figured out it was even more efficient to kill them. Didn’t ghettos stand in the way of assimilation?

That didn’t get the sort of rise out of him that I had expected. He said that obviously, at my age, with my secular Polish family, I couldn’t have acquired much direct familiarity with the problem. Then he began to ask me whether my family had been friends with a whole series of Polish nobles who had been great friends of his, at whose estates he had hunted the wild boar. Count Potocki and Count Zamoyski and Prince Radziwill and on and on. I said I didn’t think we’d known them, with one exception. I had heard that one of my paternal great-uncles used to sell manure to Prince Sapieha.

This is when Mrs. Hornung said, Really the world is so sad and so dangerous, and Mr. Hornung—perhaps taking the hint that the conversation had to be moved into another channel—began a long speech about Truman and how it may be necessary to drop an atom bomb or two on the Chinese. That launched Margot into the stratosphere. She said that dropping the bomb on the Japanese had been a crime that America would never live down and how could he even think of perpetrating such a monstrosity on another nation in Asia. They got into a real fight, with the ambassador explaining how national self-interest has to come ahead of any sentimental considerations. Nobody asked my opinion.

I congratulated Henry on how he had handled himself.

Actually, he said, if I had it to do over, I’d really let that old fart have it.

After coffee, Henry continued, when her father and the ambassador had quieted down and begun discussing investments, Margot asked whether I would take her to hear a black singer, Mabel Mercer. I could see that Margot and her parents were enthusiastic about her; suddenly I remembered that Margot’s mother had been in the business herself. Probably this singer was someone I should have known about and perhaps even seen. I don’t have to tell you that I would have taken Margot to hear anything—including “Baby It’s Cold Outside”—if she only asked. So we went to a little nightclub twenty blocks down from her parents’ place, on East Fifty-fourth Street. I thought they might not let us in when they asked whether we had a reservation, but they did. They even gave us a good table. Mabel Mercer is fat but in a kind of sexy way. Surprisingly, she has an English accent. Margot loved the performance, and I must say I liked it quite a lot too. When we asked for two Scotch and sodas they brought them without asking about our age. Two whiskeys seemed plenty, but when I saw that there was a minimum I said, Let’s have two more. To make a long story short, after the check, including the waiter’s tip, and the taxi fare to Margot’s house, I found I had spent literally my last nickel. I didn’t even have the subway fare to get home. At least she let me kiss her, not in the door of her apartment building, because of the doorman, but sort of in the middle of the block. She even opened her mouth.

And you didn’t ask her to lend you the subway fare?

How could I? It would have made her feel bad about having gone through all my money. I figured I’d walk home, but by the time I got down to the Bowery it was three in the morning. The thought that I still had to cross Manhattan Bridge and then keep going all the way to Flatbush, which would have taken at least an hour and a half, was very discouraging. That’s when I noticed a nice-looking young cop standing in front of a shuttered pawnshop. I went up to him, told him exactly what happened, and said that if he lent me a dime and gave me his name I’d send him back a paper dollar. Or leave it at the precinct. He said, Here take a quarter and get a good night’s sleep. The truth is that when I got home I did sleep like a baby, although I was so excited that I didn’t think I’d be able to close my eyes.

I said that the chances of his becoming Mr. Hornung’s son-in-law were improving.

Henry smiled. I’d be satisfied with much less.

X

S
OON AFTER THE START
of the new semester, Henry went to dinner with the Appleton sisters at their Louisburg Square house. The invitation came by letter and said nothing about George or me. Henry asked what I thought he should do. I told him he should go. It was bound to be amusing to see how the sisters live, and they would probably invite us together some other time. We’ll see, said Henry. Margot certainly won’t come if she knows that George is going to be there. But he agreed that he would accept the invitation.

I went to the movies the evening of the party. When I got back to the dormitory, Archie was still out, but Henry was there, reading. I asked him whether he had enjoyed himself. He shook his head and told me it was awful. That
Atlantic Monthly
man Weeks who’d reviewed
The Wall
—Susie mentioned him at lunch in Stockbridge—was there, and the idea seemed to be that we would talk about the novel and I guess more generally about the war in Poland. That was just what I told them I didn’t want to do: have dinner discussions on that subject. So I had to lie again. I hated it.

What do you mean? I asked.

I mean that I lied when I told Susie and Ellen that I hadn’t read the goddamn novel. Of course I had read it. And I have just lied to them again. I said I’d still not read it.

I would think these were harmless fibs, I said, but why tell them? Did you hate the book and didn’t want to contradict Susie and Mr. Weeks? I asked.

Henry groaned. Of course I didn’t want to contradict her or Mr. Weeks. But that’s not it. You heard her describe the book: it’s a novel about the Warsaw Ghetto and what Germans did to Jews in Poland. That’s the stuff of my nightmares. They’re bad nightmares. When I wake up from them I am scared. Sometimes I can’t go back to sleep and sometimes I don’t even want to for fear that I’ll start seeing the same newsreel. There is no place to run and no place to hide. In the end, they always find you. Why would I want to discuss such stuff at lunch with two ladies I’d never seen before, especially in front of you, Margot, and George? Or with a literary critic? It’s unpleasant and unseemly. Besides, whether
The Wall
in its way is a good book or not, and whatever Mr. Weeks may think about it, I resent it. I resent Hersey’s inventions—for instance all those conversations, even though I’m sure they are based on careful research, and Hersey is very respectful of the suffering, and obviously admires the courage of the Jewish fighters and all that. I suppose that if someone absolutely wants to write a historical novel about the Warsaw Ghetto, rather than a straight historical account, there is probably no way that’s better than Hersey’s. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. Or that anyone should expect me to read such a book. Or that I could “enjoy” it, whatever that means. Should I read it in order to learn more about what happened in Poland during the war? I don’t want to learn more. In fact I think I know enough. And if for some reason I can’t imagine I wanted to learn more, I’d rather read real history. Or is it to make sure that I don’t forget? If that’s the idea, it happens there is nothing I would like better than to forget, if only I could.

I mumbled some form of apology. But Henry waved it aside and said that it was he who should apologize for having made a speech. I suppose I should apologize to the Misses Appleton as well, he said. I have a feeling I ruined their dinner party.

A couple of days later he told me that there was yet another reason for his tirade against Hersey’s book: the fight he had with his mother when she gave it to him. As soon as he opened it, he saw her inscription in the upper-right-hand corner of the title page. She had written, in English, “For my beloved Son, so that he will remember from what I saved him” and signed “Mommy.” How could she? he asked. “Son” with a capital
S.
Herself as Mommy? Has she no ear for language? Couldn’t she have at least used the Polish word? That means something to me. The English is a travesty.

I was not surprised. He had told me months ago, not long after we met, that in English he always addressed his parents as Mother and Father. He couldn’t bring himself to say Mommy or Daddy. All three of them, his parents and he, had come to English too late. The diminutives refused to take form in his mouth. But Mrs. White took the usage he had adopted as an insult. She claimed it humiliated her in anyone else’s presence by denying her the term of endearment that corresponded to the word that Henry or any other normally affectionate child would naturally use in Polish. The compromise he offered, to call his parents Mom and Dad, was also rejected. She found there was something unacceptably breezy about those words, a quality that made them even worse than the stiff and cold form on which he had first settled. His anger grew, Henry said, once he had absorbed the message of the inscription itself and the connotations of the present. Never mind, he said, the sickening sentimentality. Wasn’t his graduation precisely the right moment to give him respite from the war, the unending epic of his mother’s heroism, and the rest of the debris that his mother and his father both knew he hoped at last to put behind him? Wasn’t that liberation exactly what they, as good parents, as his loving mommy and daddy, should have wished for him?

The long and the short of it, he told me, is that for once it was I who made a scene, and not my mother. I actually yelled at her. It was a new experience, and at first it made me feel good. After I had cooled off, I apologized. Not because they had made me. My father had not bothered with the usual routine about how if I don’t say that I am really very sorry and get my mother to forgive me she will do something to herself and then he will have a heart attack. My vehemence had put them in shock. They just sat there. No, I apologized with complete sincerity, of my own free will, in part because suddenly I realized how they might have come to think, in all honesty, that there was no more suitable way to mark my small triumph than with a reminder of what had come before. I wished they had chosen some other gesture, but when I had calmed down I was able to see that there hadn’t been any intention to bait me. Of course, they interpreted my contrition as a victory for them, a sign that I had been brought to heel. Perhaps for that reason the rest of the summer went by without major explosions.

E
ARLY IN
F
EBRUARY
Archie told us that his parents were coming to visit. His leg was still in a cast, and the understanding had been that they would wait until it was off and he had begun physical therapy. But the colonel had received orders to report to General Ridgeway’s headquarters, and he wanted to see Archie before shipping out.

This is a big deal for Pater, Archie told us. It may mean that the curse is off him, especially if he gets to command a regiment. Even to serve on Ridgeway’s staff will be a step forward. Anyway, they expect you both at dinner.

The nature of the curse was unclear, although Archie had dropped a hint or two about how the colonel’s personal closeness to General Patton had put him in the doghouse with practically every senior general. Then Archie announced a change in the drill. His father’s departure had been advanced; he was leaving immediately. Mrs. Palmer would be coming alone. The other change was in the venue of the dinner. Gas royalties notwithstanding, she considered dinner at the Ritz a wasteful extravagance. Instead, we were going to Cronin’s. Count your blessings, said Archie. If I had let her have her own way, she’d be having dinner with us at the Union. The drill was changed once more, and the visit postponed to an as-yet-unspecified date around Easter, to coincide with the delivery of the Sex Boat, Archie’s appellation for the Nash that Mrs. Palmer had bought for him, now that his rehabilitation was complete. According to Archie, Mrs. Palmer didn’t like the expense of traveling to Cambridge, especially if the colonel wasn’t there to pay, but was determined to go for a spin with Archie on Route 128, where he had told her he would be able to floor the gas pedal. Besides, she was busy preparing to have the Palmer household goods moved to Houston, a location that put her close to the oil and gas and yet not too far away from sources of the pre-Columbian artifacts in which she traded. A cousin with whom she had remained in contact was a member of the River Oaks Country Club and she intended to buy a house in the vicinity. The colonel liked the idea of a stateside home, particularly one that would give him a fairly decent place to play golf all year-round if he decided to retire from the army after Korea.

As though to fill the breach that had been opened in our calendar, Henry announced that his parents were arriving the following weekend to celebrate his birthday. It would be their first view of the college and, for that matter, Cambridge and Boston. The travel agent who had booked their reservations for the trip to Maine the previous summer recommended a hotel that was a short walk from the Yard across the Common. He had also given them the names of museums to visit with Henry. The open question was where and how they should entertain Henry’s roommates, which they were determined to do. They also wanted to invite George, in order to return his parents’ hospitality. Henry did not mention Margot. I guessed that he hadn’t told them enough, if anything, about her to arouse their curiosity or to make them think they had a duty to acknowledge her existence. Since they were to leave Brooklyn by car on Friday morning, Henry expected them at the hotel in the late afternoon on Friday. They would start for home on Sunday, after breakfast. But Margot, although she didn’t figure in his parents’ questions and instructions, rapidly became Henry’s biggest worry. When he told her about the impending visit—a big mistake he later thought—she expressed the categorical wish to meet them. If Henry had misgivings about exhibiting his parents to Archie and me, and, even more likely, to George, he kept them to himself but made no attempt to hide some of them from us in the case of Margot. As he considered the available solutions, one he thought he dreaded most was the prospect of a family dinner with Margot as the only guest. At the same time, the way things stood between her and George, inviting her to dinner with him there was out of the question. There was also the more fundamental issue: Should his parents meet Margot under any circumstances? On one hand, he had become very proud of Margot, or anyway of their odd friendship, and would have liked nothing more than to show her off. On the other, there was the risk that they—to be specific, his mother—would afterward make unpleasant comments about her, for instance singling out Margot’s brash curtness or, if his mother guessed that he was in love with her, about her not being Jewish. The mere idea that his mother might refer to Margot as that Gentile girlfriend was intolerable. We did not discuss the effect Mr. and Mrs. White would have on Margot, and how that entered into his calculations. However, he did explain that Margot’s being half Jewish might weigh against her. That surprised me.

It’s simple, he said. Even if Margot can’t be a real Jew because of her Gentile mother, she is Jewish enough to give my mother a reason to apply with full force the code of Krakow to her, the way she dresses, and her demeanor, and anything else you care to name. There were no bigger snobs than prewar Jewish bourgeoisie in Galicia. Forget the Berkshires and your cousins. They’ve no standards at all. The only person I met there who would pass muster in Krakow is George’s mother. She’s dressed just right and has the right combination of sweetness and venom. If Margot were just another shiksa, my mother might say that how she behaves is her own business. But a girl who might be mistaken for a Jewess, one that happens to be the object of the attention of my mother’s only son—everything about her is my mother’s business and subject to the severest censure.

Archie examined the underlying logistical problems and came up with a solution. Three of us—George, he, and I—would have dinner with Henry and his mother and father the evening of their arrival at the hotel, since they were likely to be tired from the drive. Because of their fatigue, the meal wouldn’t drag on, and that would be all to the good. On Saturday afternoon, following a museum trip or some other cultural expedition Henry might devise, there would be drinks in our suite. Sherry, he specified. Margot and three or four of our dormitory neighbors should be invited, as well as perhaps Jerry, our proctor. That number of guests should make it possible to have Margot in the same room with George.

I overheard Henry announce this program by telephone, first to his mother and then again to his father. Henry was speaking English. The language he used in addressing them varied with circumstances. It seemed to me that he used Polish when he didn’t want Archie or me to understand, and also when the subject matter didn’t require a vocabulary that he hadn’t learned before leaving Poland. I had no doubt, however, that his Polish was equal to communicating about dinner and drinks. From Henry’s long silences and the way he repeated certain sentences, it became clear that Archie’s proposals weren’t being received with complete enthusiasm. There came a moment when I felt particularly embarrassed (since by that time I was eavesdropping, and not merely happening to hear, as was most often the case) when he gave his estimate of the cost of dinner for five at the hotel, and of the gathering at our room on Saturday. I could imagine that Mr. and Mrs. White’s experience with buying sherry and pretzels or peanuts for an undergraduate cocktail party was limited, but surely they had paid for meals in a restaurant. Never mind, I heard him saying, never mind. None of this is necessary at all. Let’s just skip it. Having heard more than one discussion about money between Henry and his parents, I was surprised that he didn’t reassure them right away, as was his custom, that the expense they were facing was small, and I began to wonder whether he hadn’t decided that it would be just as well if his parents canceled the entertainments. It was a possible outcome that would spare him a good deal of anguish. He would, of course, have to announce the cancellation to Archie and me, and I supposed to Margot as well, but that awkwardness would be as nothing to the one he dreaded. In fact, all he had to say was that his overly possessive parents had decided that they would prefer to savor the company of their only son on this birthday weekend in strict family intimacy and without any dilution. Or something more or less like that. The ground for that sort of thing was prepared; he had bad-mouthed his parents so relentlessly.