Matters of Honor (25 page)

He stared at me as though expecting a reply. Only the most obvious occurred to me: in the long time we had known each other, I had never doubted his love for his mother and father, or doubted that they knew he loved them. And I knew that their love for him was the central fact of their lives.

That’s what makes it so much worse, he said. I did it to them and I did it to myself. As though I had been sleepwalking.

Although it was late, I couldn’t simply leave him, not with that masque of murder playing itself out in his head. If he didn’t have to go back all the way to Brooklyn, I’d propose a nightcap. I asked where he was staying.

At Margot’s, he said.

I contained my astonishment and asked whether, in that case, we might have a drink at some bar near the restaurant or at my apartment. He consulted his watch and shook his head.

I’d better get back. Margot said she’d be out late, but she should be getting home just about now.

All right, I replied, I’ll see you in Cambridge sometime before Christmas, unless you get to the city earlier.

We shook hands, and just as we were each about to turn, he east to the subway station and I west toward Park Avenue, he called out, Wait, I have an idea, why don’t you have a drink with Margot and me?

I asked, Are you sure that she won’t mind?

She’ll be thrilled.

In the taxi going uptown I reminded him that when we saw each other last—I took care not to refer to the circumstances—he had said that he would explain next time where he stood with Margot.

Ah yes, he said, I remember. She wrote right after Commencement, very affectionately, congratulating me on the summa and so forth. At the end she suggested that I call her at her parents’ apartment. Fortunately, the letter caught me just before I sailed for Europe so I called immediately and she said, Come over. The doorman told me to go up. It turned out that Mr. and Mrs. Hornung were away for the week, but the butler was there and he served us a cold dinner with wine—and drinks before that. The full treatment. Then we went to Eddie Condon’s to listen to jazz. I forget who was playing. I was too excited to pay attention. We couldn’t really talk over the music so we went back to her house. She kicked off her shoes and we both sat on the sofa in the library. She told me she’d go to Sarah Lawrence in the fall and wouldn’t even try to return to Radcliffe. Then she said she was sorry about the way she left me, that it was all her fault, a crazy period of too many things happening in her life all at once, and only one thing was certain, that she and Etienne were through. He was a major part of the craziness, he and his friends, and all the running around in New York hotels and in Europe, as though in some novel F. Scott Fitzgerald hadn’t written. So could we go back to the way we were? She held out her face for me to kiss. I thought I was in a trance. She told me that meant we would be the tenderest and closest of friends; she might even sleep with me, though not that evening. But I would have to recognize the way she was, which for the time being didn’t include being faithful and pretending we were married when we weren’t. I said yes. Can you imagine my saying no? She’s a curatorial assistant at the Met now, in the drawings department. Mr. Hornung is a big donor. She has a little apartment near the parents. Have I already told you that? I know that I’ve told you—I think the day we met—that Margot would be my long-term project. Well, I was right.

T
HE TINY APARTMENT
was of the sort devised, she said, in certain Park and Fifth Avenue buildings as a dwelling for widows, old maids, and confirmed bachelors, so that at absurd expense they could live in four exiguous rooms and benefit from all the services and security that people like her parents considered appropriate. Two sofas faced each other in the living room. A long and narrow coffee table had been placed before one on which she and Henry sat after she had served us whiskey and sodas. I sat on the other, facing them. I had to hand it to Henry. She was superb, changed not only from that first vision of her in the Yard but from wherever I had seen her last, at some cocktail party or in the Square. She was wearing her hair longer, so that her face seemed softer; the lipstick was subdued; her dress was straighter and shorter and had a softer line than what I was accustomed to think of as the New Look. Her incredibly long legs shimmered in iridescent white stockings. Leaning back against the cushions, she told me how glad she was to see me. We talked about her plans, Sarah Lawrence, and the Met. After next summer she’d study in Europe, at the Courtauld or the École du Louvre, perhaps both. She’d be in New York during Henry’s summer vacation, while he was settling his father’s estate. She’d try to get him out of the city on weekends. Her parents might rent a house in East Hampton, instead of going to Cap Ferrat as usual. It depended on whether her father could arrange to join the Maidstone Club. She laughed as the words left her mouth. It’s absurd, she said, neither he nor Mother plays tennis or golf, but he would be unhappy if he couldn’t pick up the telephone and reserve a court.

I said that some people who came to the Berkshires apparently felt the same way about our club, which wasn’t much, and then asked why the Maidstone would be a problem for her parents.

She laughed again and said, Jews and Negroes aren’t welcome. Irish Catholics aren’t either, or Italians, unless they have what the admissions committee thinks is a real title.

And your parents? I said, thinking, perhaps wrongly, that I shouldn’t let on that Henry had gossiped.

Don’t you know they’re Jewish? she asked. My mother too, although it’s a big secret and she’d be furious if she knew I’d told you. My father’s different. He doesn’t hide being Jewish; he just doesn’t push it.

I had finished my drink and Henry offered to refill my glass. It was very late. I told them that I had been very happy to have dinner with Henry, perhaps even happier to see them together.

She said she had meant to thank me for all I had done to help Henry.

Help him? I inquired, genuinely puzzled.

Yes, she answered, from the beginning, when you told him to stop being so shy with me. We’re not self-hating anti-Semitic Jews. We’re only snobs.

I asked whether that was better.

Certainly, she said, so far as we’re concerned everyone gets a second and third chance.

To do what?

Don’t be so dense, Henry said, to remake himself.

XXIV

A
RCHIE STARTED AT
W
HARTON
right after the army, but he didn’t like Philadelphia, and after the first year he quit and went to work for a Wall Street investment bank. The idea was that with his perfect Spanish, elegant manners, and local contacts he would help invigorate its business in Central and South America. I began playing squash with him again. My game was once more in shambles, and Archie was exactly what I needed to force me to play with some energy and will to win. After a while I managed occasionally to beat him. He was all cunning and speed, which I preferred to cannonball serves one can’t possibly return and the like. So long as Archie worked downtown, we played at the end of the afternoon, which suited me very well. At some point, he changed jobs. His new firm was midtown, and we began to play almost always during the lunch hour, which at first seemed less convenient for me, but as I was learning to get up early and get right to work, a midday break in reality wasn’t too disruptive. We’d play at the Harvard Club and then have a hamburger in the grillroom downstairs. Some time later, Archie joined a much grander uptown club, with squash facilities of regal splendor, and began inviting me to play there after work. I accepted once in a while, with considerable reluctance. I didn’t like having him pay for me, and he refused all my offers to contribute toward the court fee and drinks that followed. It was the custom of the place to have the waiter bring cocktails or whatever else you ordered to the large room adjoining the locker room. The custom also called for conversation to be general so that you were more or less forced to talk to the members and occasional guests who happened to be there. I didn’t care for the type to which they ran; they reminded me of certain friends of George’s at college who, to a man, wore their club ties pushed forward like battering rams by the gold pins that squeezed together the wings of the collar. Or their conversation. When they spoke, they honked like geese. A hot subject just then was the number of girls they or their female cousins knew whom Jack Kennedy had raped, as though well-brought-up girls wouldn’t jump into bed with the president just because he happened to be a Mick.

Neither these appalling clubman friends nor the amount of booze Archie consumed had so far discouraged his new girlfriend, Phoebe Jones. Behind the various facades he erected, she sensed lying hidden the nagging insecurity. With that discovery, the road to her grand objective—building up his self-esteem—was clear, and the distance from there to falling in love was quickly covered. For a twenty-four-year-old graduate of a small liberal arts college in Ohio working as an assistant editor at a magazine for teens, she was very maternal, notwithstanding her own facade of all-business gray or brown suits like those in the windows of Peck & Peck, crisp striped shirts, and brown pumps with high heels that made her half a head taller than Archie. Unlike him, she was a reader, with a taste for nineteenth-century novels. She was well into Dostoyevsky. Stendhal was next on her list. I supposed that someday she would reach Henry James and recognize herself as an updated and milder Henrietta Stackpole.

Archie sought me out regularly to make a threesome for drinks after our evening games. The reason was obvious: as a novelist I was the kind of New Yorker Phoebe wanted to know, and I was living proof that being Archie’s girl didn’t condemn her to the exclusive company of his Voorhis, Schermerhorn, van Gelder, and Phipps stockbroker and lawyer club mates and their more staid conversation, once they were out of the locker room, about Squadron A reunions, Blue Hill Troupe performances, summer rentals in Amagansett and Newport, and, of course, the importation of Irish and British nannies. Although Henry, like Voorhis, was a lawyer, and Phoebe found lawyers as dull as stockbrokers, she liked him as a fellow lover of books. However, his usefulness to Archie was even more limited than mine, because he spent most evenings and many weekends at the office.

Even the hard drinkers I knew among classmates who had come to live in New York had reduced their intake of booze to a modest if steady trickle. Archie was a notable exception, as I discovered anew every time he maneuvered me into going out to dinner with him and Phoebe. If anything, he was drinking more than at college, and, I gathered from Phoebe’s occasional sarcasm and stories he told on himself in his old self-deprecating way, he was still getting drunk. Not just at weekend parties but pretty much every day of the week. The first martini or two would convince him that the occasion was festive; the rest was a familiar, drearily routine process. Countless infallible remedies, the recipes of which he had acquired from the most seasoned of bartenders, accounted for his being able to report for work the next day at almost the normal hour and got him through the morning until a little hair of the dog and lunch were at hand. There was also a secret weapon: a tank of oxygen he kept at his bedside. He assured me that a couple of whiffs cleared the head and most if not all other symptoms. I disliked watching him drink, and having Phoebe as another witness only made it worse; I thought it was unseemly.

The news that they were going to get married—given over the phone by Archie—came as a surprise. I would have thought she had more sense. The engagement was confirmed in the next morning’s
Times
and, a few days later, by an invitation to a party for the couple hosted by two brothers who were pillars of Archie’s grandest club. I was unable to attend and instead invited Archie and Phoebe to have a drink with me a couple of weeks later at the Plaza. I asked Henry as well, but he was in Washington, making a presentation to the Treasury about the impact of some newly introduced tax on the business of a client. From remarks made by each, and from a conversation with Archie, which must have taken place around the time of the engagement, in the course of which he said that Henry didn’t have much of a social life, I knew that Archie and Henry were seeing each other. Archie wished he could help by getting him into some of his clubs. The Harvard Club, to which Henry did belong, was all right for squash, which Henry had in fact given up because he had too much work, but not much use for anything else. The situation would be entirely different if Henry were in the Union or the Racquet, but that was out of the question. They don’t let them in, he told me.

Not long afterward I received an invitation from Archie that was more like a plea to have drinks again at the Plaza. It caught me in a moment of weakness, and I agreed although I had pretty much decided to limit our encounters to the squash court. I was late to the Oak Room and saw immediately that he and Phoebe were close to finishing a round of martinis. Archie made some good-natured noise in response to my apologies and got the waiter to take my order and bring another round for them. She told him not to bother; she’d be leaving in a moment. I told you, she said, that I can’t face another one of these evenings. Besides I have a terrible headache. In a gesture of discouragement, she took off her glasses and looked away. There were tears in her eyes.

Don’t get cross with me today of all days, replied Archie, you know I have a lot on my mind. This will be different. Come on, if you stay, Sam will stay too, and he’ll make sure I behave. Right? He squeezed my forearm and then patted it.

I nodded, thinking that since my tardiness had given Archie a head start on the gin I bore some responsibility for this unpleasantness. My whiskey and soda came, and I drank it slowly. This turned out to be a mistake because Archie used the time to ingest two more martinis before we walked over to one of his favorite hangouts, on Lexington Avenue and 60th, just a few blocks away. It was I who suggested it, wanting to be spared the taxi ride to the Mafia restaurant on East 114th Street that Archie also favored, but that too was a mistake, because as usual we had to wait at the bar for a table, and it was not an establishment where one waited empty-handed. In fact, we all three had a drink. I was relieved that the liquor didn’t seem to be affecting Archie. His face was red; that was all. Perhaps the cold air during our short walk had given him the equivalent of a hit from his oxygen tank. It was only when the waiter finally brought the main course that I noticed the change. Archie was droning on pedantically, repeating himself, brooking no interruption by Phoebe. First it was all about how the securities firm for which he worked had decided that he would have to spend at least half of his time in Mexico, Salvador, and Venezuela where his contacts were concentrated. He would also have to develop clients in Argentina and Peru. Peru, said Archie, was a cinch. He had a perfect point of contact: one of his rugby pals, whose Spanish mother had vast properties there and a house in Lima where he would meet everybody who counted. Argentina was tricky. Phoebe would definitely have to travel with him, job or no job, particularly her current job, which she should quit anyway as too time-consuming for Mrs. Archibald P. Palmer III. She didn’t have time to answer, and perhaps wouldn’t have answered anyway, because Archie suddenly got up and headed in the direction of the toilets. His gait was unsteady, as if on the rolling deck of a boat before having got his sea legs. I followed his progress, hoping that he wouldn’t collide with the waiters rushing from the kitchen with steaming plates of spaghetti.

After he returned, Phoebe and I watched in silence while he picked at his food. Archie was an irritatingly slow eater under the best of circumstances. Having vomited, as I surmised from his pallor, he seemed determined to make up for what he had expelled, at least in drink. Over Phoebe’s protest, he ordered a second bottle of wine, had the waiter fill our glasses, and, having emptied his own, launched without any sort of transition into a series of anecdotes about the proceedings of the admissions committee of his grandest club. He had gone on the committee only recently, and his stories all concerned the cunning with which committee members would ferret out, reading between the lines of letters of support and canvassing their own acquaintances, the guilty secrets that the candidate, and sometimes even his sponsor or second, had hoped would pass undetected. Typically, it was Jewish relatives whom the candidate had kept at a long arm’s length, although all his money came from the Jewish family’s fortune. It was much the same with Irish Catholics, and there was, he said, the case of an Italian about whom it was claimed that his family were all landed gentry in Tuscany, whereas in fact his mother, father, and cousins all lived in northern New Jersey and prospered dealing in scrap iron. As he rambled on the waiter arrived to take orders for dessert. I saw in this an opportunity, and said I had to go home to do a little work before turning in.

A
T THE BEGINNING
of the summer I left for Paris. During my stay I received a phone call from Phoebe. She too was in Paris, as a reporter attached to the Paris bureau of
Time.
We had dinner, and during the course of the meal she confirmed what I had already deduced: her breakup with Archie. She was bitter and upset. The drinking, she felt, had become an instrument of aggression; Archie was signaling that he didn’t want to be married. In any event, that he didn’t want to be married to her. She knew that I was an old friend of his and wasn’t asking me to agree or disagree.

I returned to New York in late September, moved into an apartment in a converted carriage house in the East Seventies, and invited Henry to a housewarming dinner at which he was the only guest. I told him about Phoebe’s tale of woe. He nodded and said that Archie was off his rocker. There was more to it, he added mysteriously, but he would let Archie clue me in. It was Henry’s third year in practice. He told me he was working as hard as ever, perhaps harder. There was much to talk about, but the next day he was again going out of town and had to rush back to the office to prepare. We agreed to have dinner when he got back, in two weeks’ time. It was his turn, he said, he would take me to a restaurant.

In the meantime, to get my game in shape, I played squash at midday with the Harvard Club pro. I didn’t make lunch dates, preferring to have a bite alone or to go home and eat something out of the fridge. After one of those games, I was walking out of the club when the hall porter stopped me, saying the chef has his radio on in the kitchen and has just heard that the president has been shot. I stopped and, in my colossal stupidity, asked, The president? President Pusey?

No, he answered, the president of the United States.

I
WENT INTO THE STREET
, and for some reason started running. Running where? At first, I didn’t know, but it turned out to be home. By the time I reached Park Avenue, flags were being lowered and limousines stopped at the curb with the door on the driver’s side open. The radios turned on full blast repeated the news. He had been shot and he was dead.

But I was alive. A week later I was about to call Archie to ask for a game when he rang me. I must have made good progress with the club pro or perhaps Archie was out of shape. I beat him. He waited until after the game to tell me his news, over a beer at the bar. His engagement to Phoebe was off. I let on that she had called me in Paris. Without giving me time to mumble about being sorry, he said, Now here is the good news, I’m getting married. He produced a picture of the bride-to-be he had in his wallet. She was very blond, blue eyed, slightly on the plump side. German? I asked. I was clever to guess, Archie said, German on both sides, her parents living in Buenos Aires since the end of the war. The father had held a high rank in the German navy and had built a big food export-import business. The wedding would be in six months, in New York. The parents were happy about the location; they knew a lot of people in the city and it would be more convenient for their family and friends in Germany. Then he and Alma would go on a little wedding trip out west. After their return, the parents would have a big reception in BA. It’ll be a perfect wedding, he said, if you agree to be an usher. Henry has already said he will be the best man. It’s a good match, and Alma’s a very special woman, he said with great seriousness. She’s a wonderful influence on me.