The Friend of Women and Other Stories (14 page)

“He's been just as good a friend to me, sir, as I to him,” Fred replied stoutly. “Maybe it's a case of what in biology class we call symbiosis.”

This was not true, as Fred was well aware and, as he suspected, Mr. Simpson was equally aware. But it sounded good, which was what counted, both to the latter and to himself. Fred had written to his mother about his friendship with Alistair and his visits to the Long Island estate, and she had encouraged him to cultivate so advantageous a relationship. “You'll be doing as much a favor for that boy's father,” she had written, “as he can ever do for you. I miss my guess if a keen tycoon like Mr. Simpson won't hang on to someone who can bolster the weakling I gather his boy is. Perhaps he sees you as the son he really wanted. It's only kind to comfort a disappointed parent.” Fred's mother had a quality rare in ambitious mothers: she perceived the value of perceived kindness in one's ascent in the world.

Mr. Simpson nodded, a bit perfunctorily, to acknowledge Fred's overstatement of his debt to Alistair. “It's nice of you to say that, my boy. And it gives me further assurance of the value of your friendship with him. Certainly, it's only natural for a father to be more concerned with what such a companionship does for his son than what it does for you. But I wish to benefit you as well as him. Alistair is going to Yale. I want you to go with him, and I want you to room with him there. But I understand that this might be a heavy strain on your father's budget. I should be happy to supply your tuition.”

This was not altogether a surprise to Fred, as Alistair had already hinted at the possibility. He knew of his father's hope that he would undertake a military career, but he was also aware that he could count on his mother to stifle any such hope. One of her firmest resolutions—and these were very-firm—was that her son should not be trapped in what she called the cul-de-sac of the army. Fred was certainly going to take Mr. Simpson up on his generous offer, but first it was in the interests of his dignity to convert a gift into something more like a contract.

“Father is very keen on my going to West Point,” he observed, “and he may be in a position to get me a preference there. There would be no tuition, and I have had to give the matter a good deal of thought. But I must admit I've had some doubts about an army career, and the prospect of Yale with Alistair is certainly tempting.”

“Well, think it over anyway,” Mr. Simpson said, in a tone that seemed assured of a favorable answer. Had he fathomed Fred's purpose in his seeming stall? And if he had, didn't he approve? Weren't they basically, Fred wondered, two of a kind?

Of course, he didn't have to think it over. He and his mother had already prepared his father for the likelihood of his matriculation at Yale. And his final year at Chelton was something of a triumph. He was elected one of the seven prefects who helped the faculty in the administration of the school, he was editor in chief of the
Cheltonian
, president of the debating society, and his diploma was engraved with the Latin phrase
summa cum laude.

Yet he had a somewhat disturbing chat one morning after a class in English with Mr. Baxter, the wise old head of that department and known as the most intellectual master at the school. Baxter had asked him to remain after dismissing the others on the pretext of discussing Fred's paper on Trollope's
The Way We Live Now.

“You know, Fred,” he began in an informal and friendly tone, “that I often feel we put too much stress on extracurricular activities in a boy's last year at Chelton. The graduating class has to run so many things: the school paper, the dramatics, the debates, the crew, the football team, and so on, so they have no time to... well, to find their souls. And isn't it a time to do so? They are really already men.”

“I don't quite see what you mean, sir,” Fred replied a bit uneasily, for he tended to shy away from the abstract.

“I wonder if you don't. I've had an eye on you, my lad. A friendly eye, I should add. Take this paper of yours—for which, incidentally, I'm giving you an A. Aren't you perhaps implying that Trollope is pulling his punches?”

“How do you mean, sir?”

“That he doesn't really believe in the happy ending of his novel. In the collapse of the villain Melmotte's fraudulent money schemes and the triumph of the good guys. That Trollope has supplied all that for his rosy-eyed Victorian readers though he knows perfectly well that the monkey business of London's financial world is going to go right on as before.”

“And you're suggesting that it wouldn't? Is that your point, sir?”

“No, I'm not concerned with Trollope's London. At the moment I'm concerned with a bright young Chelton sixth former called Frederick Coates. Does he regard his about-to-be alma mater as a dim bulb lit by those who vainly hope it will illuminate a dark world? A world that nothing can illuminate? And is the said Coates one of the rare few who sees the hopelessness?”

“And if I did see that,” Fred said, after a considerable pause, “how do you suggest it would affect me?”

“Wouldn't the temptation be to live entirely for yourself?”

Fred stared, with a sudden, almost eerie fascination, into the sad but kind eyes of this intently gazing old man. Was the door of a new communication actually opening a crack for him? It was interesting; it was on the edge of being exciting; it was somehow dangerous. Not only for him, but perhaps also for Mr. Baxter. He parted his lips to answer, but then closed them. Didn't he see something else in those searching eyes? Couldn't he make out that the dim bulb was what Mr. Baxter himself dreaded to see as the image of the school to which he had given his all? And if that were the case, what would the poor fellow's life amount to?

“No, sir,” he replied firmly. “I don't see Chelton that way at all.”

“Well, perhaps that's just as well,” said Mr. Baxter with a sigh.

***

At Yale, Fred and Alistair, though roommates, began to go their different ways. The friendship remained, but Alistair was growing restless under the other's semi-tutorial role. He was still his amiable, easygoing self, and he still attracted the few classmates he took the trouble to meet, but he went to New York every weekend to satisfy a professed passion for the theater. He drank more, and Fred suspected that his once latent but now emerging homosexuality accounted for his absences as well as for his taste for Broadway. Ultimately, in his sophomore year, after a thunderous row with his father, he dropped out of Yale altogether and took up abode in Greenwich Village, living comfortably on the ample income that his death tax-saving parent bitterly regretted having settled on him. The latter's affection for Fred, however, survived his rift with his son. He recognized that Fred had done everything for Alistair that could be done, and he continued his financial support, even to some extent putting his son's friend into the filial space in his heart that the son had abandoned.

Fred was quick to note that at Yale Chelton was not quite the ticket to campus success that he had hoped, for his classmates from there tended to be cliquey and to associate with their counterparts from St. Mark's or St. Paul's, while the graduates of larger preparatory schools, like Andover and Exeter, dominated the social scene. Fred easily affiliated himself with a group of men whom he spotted as campus leaders: they ran the
Daily News,
the Political Union, the more exclusive fraternities, and became members in their final year of one or another of the six secret societies. The group, closely knit, had distinct common denominators: they all came from more or less privileged Protestant Anglo-Saxon families; they all had been privately educated, and they all were endowed with a highly patriotic and idealistic desire to become responsible and liberal leaders in law or business or even politics. The Roaring Twenties were out of fashion, the cloud of the Great Depression had lifted, and the rise of dictators in Europe gave the boys the needed foe to raise a glorious standard against. Most of them opposed their fathers in their enthusiasm for FDR and his New Deal.

Fred saw in them the wave of the future. There was nothing in their creed that he could not easily and convincingly adopt. But unlike them there were things he observed that they didn't. He noted that, although, with apparent sincerity, they roundly condemned any form of discrimination, there were no Catholics, Jews, homosexuals, indigents, or radicals among them. He likened the group to what in early Victorian days Disraeli had called Young England—graceful, youthful aristocrats of mildly liberal views. These observations, however, he did not feel obliged to share with his new friends.

Yet he did make one friend outside of this group, Nathan Levy. Nathan was the son of a prominent New York newspaper owner and a member of a prominent German-Jewish family. He had a long, dark, handsome oval face and thick, sleek black hair; he was supposedly intensely intellectual and was an editor of the
Yale Literary Magazine,
but he held himself somewhat aloofly from the undergraduate body, as if he considered himself above boyish amusements. He was also reputed to embrace leftist political views and to be on the outs with his influential parent.

Fred, as an editor of the
News,
first got to know Nathan when he induced him to review for the paper a play, which, as many dramas then did, was opening in New Haven before assailing Broadway. It was a parlor comedy satirizing the apoplectic opposition of Wall Street to the New Deal, and Nathan's review had been brilliantly witty but also scathing. Fred, who had assumed that Nathan would have approved of the play, asked him what had caused his harshness.

“The play is full of sham liberalism” was Levy's relaxed, rather drawling reply. “The kind of crap the more intelligent conservatives put out to make the masses feel that Tories are basically liberal. Sometimes they almost mean it. But it's still crap.”

“But if they almost mean it, maybe they're almost sincere.”

“Who cares? It's easy to make fun of extreme right-wingers. They're so absurdly pompous. But people like the author of this silly play fundamentally dote on the very things they purport to satirize. Like Marquand and O'Hara, for example. They pine for all the shiny baubles they jeer at: the swank clubs, the exclusive parties, the smart set, the whole world of money and privilege. Like Thackeray and the lords and ladies he professed to mock. Or Proust and the duchesses whose asses he kissed.”

Fred was amused. “What writers are there who are genuine liberals?”

“There are plenty, but unhappily they're apt to be unreadable.”

“So the Tories have it all to themselves?”

“You should know, Coates. Didn't you go to Chelton?”

“That I did. But it seems to me that you go rather too far. Look at my friends here on the
News.
They all believe in a better world. In a less hierarchical society. In a fairer distribution of the wealth.”

“Oh, yes, I know those preppies,” Levy retorted sneeringly. “I went to Ames Academy myself. Not exactly Chelton, to be sure, but along those lines. I know about their ideals. I know they want to be as pure as King Arthur's knights. But at heart they're full of the old school spirit. Over or under but never around! Our team must never lose! Wave the stars and stripes above their heads and they'll fight for the devil himself. Oh, yes, they're brave enough. But they can be had. Courage is cheap. Physical courage, anyway.”

“I wonder if I don't need to see more of you,” Fred said thoughtfully.

“Any time, fella. Be my guest. You have an army background, don't you?”

“You seem to know everything.”

“Oh, I keep my eyes open. You may be a brand to be plucked from the burning. The army
and
Chelton! Wouldn't that be a feather in my cap!”

This conversation took place in the fall of Fred's junior year, and in the months that followed he saw Nathan Levy frequently and read some of the socialist and Marxist literature that his new friend provided. He found the relationship stimulating; a philosophy that annihilated the individual in view of the general well-being intrigued him. It seemed to offer a relaxation from tension at the same time that it provided a goal for action. Didn't it basically make life easier? At least simpler?

He didn't have to introduce Nathan to any of his old group, as Nathan had no interest in them, and as they, for all their stout denial, would have shown little enthusiasm for a Jewish radical. Faced with these two supposedly liberal doctrines of his Yale experience, Fred felt he had to choose between the one that regarded FDR as the leader who had saved the nation from revolution and the one that had branded the president as the force that was holding back the uprising that would redeem the world.

The choice became critical that spring when Fred was told by friends that he was likely to be tapped, as it was put, for membership in the senior society Scroll & Key. This select group of fifteen seniors, who met twice a week in a windowless stone building where they presumably discussed their souls and futures, was not quite so prodigious as Skull & Bones, which claimed the leaders of the class, but it was distinctly more “social” and was rumored to be the
Open, Sesame
to many a paneled door on New York's Wall and Boston's State Street.

“This is the ultimate test, Frederick Coates,” Nathan warned him solemnly. “As a Keys man you'll be forever lost to us and wedded to the establishment.”

Fred did something he had never done before: he turned to another for advice. That other was Mr. Simpson, his guardian angel. But Mr. Simpson was a Keys man from Yale, 1905. And Fred knew that! Didn't that mean, he asked himself feverishly, that he had already made up his own mind? Well, what if he had? Hadn't Simpson paid his bills? Didn't that create at least a moral debt? Or were there no moral debts, except to oneself? Well, there he was!