Matters of Honor (13 page)

As it turned out, the parents didn’t veto either the dinner or the party, but the party became unnecessary, and Margot was invited to dinner along with Archie and me. George said that he had to be away, at Mount Snow, with his parents, sisters, and the sisters’ husbands, on the Standishes’ annual ski weekend. Another change, for which Margot was responsible, was that the dinner would take place on Saturday, at the Henri IV. She explained to Henry that hotel food and hotel restaurants were fatally
triste;
she couldn’t abide them. Besides, she added, won’t your parents be thrilled to celebrate your birthday in a restaurant named for you?

H
AVE YOU EVER HEARD
of such a thing? You, his roommate and best friend: Can you imagine what kind of son I have? Mrs. White asked as soon as we reached the table Archie had reserved. Margot and Archie had been waiting for us. She put me on her right and Archie on her left. In accordance with her instructions, Mr. White was next to me and Margot between him and Henry. Archie’s standing at the Henri IV was lofty; that was why we had been directed to the corner table, and had been spared, even though it was a Saturday evening, the wait at the bar upstairs.

When we arrived at the hotel yesterday, Mrs. White continued without releasing her hold on my arm, we found your roommate spread out in an armchair in the lobby—asleep with his mouth open. Thank God, he wasn’t snoring! I spoke to him, and nothing. Then his father called him by his name. Still nothing. Finally, when I kissed him, he decided to wake up. I said, So this is how you greet your parents: you get drunk. And do you know what? Right away, he got so mad I thought he would kill me. Look at him. He had to be drunk. Only drunks and eighty-year-old men can’t stay awake in the afternoon. And he isn’t even ashamed.

This was the second time I was hearing this anecdote. She had told it to me on the way to the restaurant, so that I could only guess that she was repeating it not for my benefit but for the edification of the rest of the party. Since Margot had offered to bring Archie in a taxi, I had gone with Henry to get his parents at the hotel. I had supposed that we too would take a taxi to the restaurant, but Mr. and Mrs. White said they preferred to walk. We split into two pairs. I accompanied Mrs. White, who took my arm before I remembered to offer it. Mr. White and Henry followed.

Rysiek is a very lucky boy, she said. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.

Who is that? I asked.

Who is Rysiek? she replied. Rysiek is Rysiek.

Then, having realized how obtuse I was, she laughed, gave my arm a squeeze, and told me she was referring to Henry by his little name. What was the English word for such a little name? Diminutive, I suggested. She repeated diminutive after me, and cast about for the Latin root, which she found.

Henry is Henryk in Polish, she explained, like Henryk Sienkiewicz, the author of
Quo Vadis.
From Henryk you get Henrysiek, and you shorten Henrysiek to Rysiek. That’s the way it is in Polish. We use diminutives. For example, my father’s name was Jacob, but his family and friends called him Kuba.

I was going to ask her about Mr. White’s name and her own, but she cut me off to express the hope that my parents were well. I assured her that they were, whereupon she inquired whether they came to see me often. Not waiting for my answer, she said once again that Rysiek was a very lucky boy, but why did he have to drink so much? Neither his father nor she drank alcohol, except perhaps a glass of wine with dinner, if they went out or had guests at home. I said that I didn’t think that Henry drank, but she insisted I was wrong. That is when she first related the scene of coming upon his comatose body in the lobby. Had she been in his place, she would have been worried sick about her parents’ being late and asking herself whether the car had broken down or, the way his father drives, whether they had had an accident.

The idea that Henry had conked out in the hotel lobby struck me as no less strange than Mrs. White’s suspicion that he was drunk at that hour of the afternoon until I remembered that he had not slept at all the preceding night, writing a paper on Pericles’ funeral oration and swallowing one Nodoz pill after another until, as he told me that morning, he found himself at dawn unable to stop chewing the pages he had pulled from his typewriter, crumpled, and thrown on the floor. I proffered the explanation of a deadline to be met, without any mention of the pills.

Why should he be writing a paper at night instead of sleeping? she countered. Normal people work during the day and sleep at night.

Again, I came to Henry’s defense. He was working very hard, I said, harder than anybody I knew, what with difficult Latin and Greek courses and intensive French. Although I knew that she was aware of the grade he received on every quiz, exam, and paper, I added that he was a remarkably good student.

And you, Mr. Roommate, she said, are you also at college to learn Latin and Greek?

I replied that I was convinced I had learned all the Latin I wanted to know at school. I was going to major in English.

English. She laughed. And here I thought that you already spoke the language perfectly.

I laughed with her.

The subject of my intellectual development having been for the moment exhausted, she returned to what I could see was her bête noire. Why does Rysiek think he should study classics? she asked. She went on to speak about how they had lost everything in Poland, how hard she and her husband were working to give Henry a good home and a good education, and how he should be thinking about his future instead of throwing away his opportunities.

Not having a ready answer, I remained silent and concentrated on her. She was good-looking—no, in reality she was beautiful and sexy. It was odd to have that impression of the mother of my roommate, but I certainly did. She made me think of a Lana Turner with jet-black hair. Henry’s flaming top had come from his father. I had observed her wool suit of a lighter brown than the voluptuously ample beaver coat with which Mr. White helped her as we were leaving the hotel. May Standish might well have worn such a suit and such a fur, but, on a night as cold as this, with patches of ice on the sidewalk, she would have had her feet in some sort of booties. Mrs. White wore burgundy pumps with high heels. I thought of my own mother, who was no less good-looking or well turned out if the occasion called for it. There was a big difference. In my mother’s case, it always seemed as though she had thrown on her clothes at the last minute, improvising the entire effect to include just a hint of slatternliness. Mrs. White exercised her charms differently. Mr. White’s grooming also left nothing to chance. I liked his gray herringbone tweed jacket, crisp Oxford gray flannels, beautifully shined black wingtips, white-on-white shirt, blue necktie of heavy silk with a darker blue stripe, black overcoat, and black fedora with a little red feather in the hatband. A white handkerchief, neatly folded to make two triangles, peeked out from the breast pocket of his jacket. Black calfskin leather gloves, looking new and expensive, completed the picture. Once I had examined Mr. White, the secret of the garments Mrs. White had bought for Henry so that he would be appropriately equipped for college was revealed. She had quite simply gotten him the clothes she was in the habit of choosing for Mr. White, only larger, because Henry, though small boned, was taller, and needed room to grow. How could she know that those of Henry’s classmates he had chosen to emulate affected quite a different style?

To return to the Henri IV, Mrs. White’s opening salvo had put the king’s namesake in a state of mute rage she must have foreseen. I began to wonder whether the quarrel between son and mother would explode right then and there, and I believe that it would have if Archie had not headed it off. It wasn’t likely that Henry had told his parents what he knew of Archie’s accident. To do so would have heightened the suspicion with which they were inclined to regard both Archie and me. Perhaps the parents didn’t even know how badly he had been banged up. Normally, he made light of his injuries, but this time he made use of them. His crutches were leaning against the wall behind his chair where Henry had put them. Therefore, I was well placed to see him perform the maneuver that sent them crashing to the floor. Once the clatter had stopped the conversation, Archie slowly recounted the story of the car accident omitting none of the details other than the drinking at the officers’ club that had preceded it. The Whites listened to him as though mesmerized, presumably calculating the risks to which Henry’s friendship with this strange and charming young man exposed him.

There is a silver lining, Archie added. I am getting my own set of wheels. I mean a car.

At that, Mrs. White drew a deep breath and said she had never heard anything like it. She felt very sorry for his parents, especially his mother.

Archie shook his head.

Actually, he replied, Mother is tough, tougher than my father even though he is the soldier.

Then he told us that the colonel thought a Chinese attack across the Yalu River was imminent, in which case Russia would get involved as well as China, so that the U.S. would have to use tactical nuclear weapons.

Absolutely, said Mr. White.

As he talked about the designs of the Russians and the Chinese on the rest of the world it occurred to me that the one person I knew who would agree with him all the way down the line was old Gummy, at our country club. Except that Gummy also thought that we should have limited our involvement in World War II to the defeat of Japan, and let the Germans and the Russians finish off each other, a notion that Mr. White, if he thought of his family’s likely fate in such an event, would not have approved.

It fell to me to take Archie back to the dormitory that evening. While we waited for the taxi the owner of the restaurant had called, I told him that I had rather liked Mr. and Mrs. White.

They’re not half bad, he replied, but they’ll get in Henry’s way.

XI

I
N THE END
, there was to be no dinner at all with Mrs. Palmer. She told Archie that the coffee shop at the Commodore where she was staying—across the street from the hotel the Whites had chosen—was perfect for her needs. A bite there alone was all the evening entertainment she needed in Cambridge. Archie laughed about it and said we weren’t missing much, and Mater was having a blast pinching pennies. She did, however, consent to come to our rooms for a drink. This time there was no talk of sherry; Mrs. Palmer favored S.S. Pierce bourbon, which had managed to make its way to the far-flung officers’ clubs she and the colonel had frequented. Having studied her photograph on the dresser in Archie’s room, where she appeared at the side of a young officer resplendent in dress blues, I was disappointed. Instead of the more mature version of Hedy Lamarr I had expected, the little old lady I was introduced to evoked a missionary nun or the housekeeper of a bedridden old codger living in a house too large for him at the end of a hillside village in a black-and-white French film. Either the photograph had been heavily touched up or time had been particularly cruel to her. As I might have surmised, Mrs. Palmer’s dress—black crepe-soled shoes, black stockings, a dark gray skirt of harsh flannel, and a black cardigan worn over a gray shirt with a small round collar—had a purpose. The point was to be comfortable on the Greyhound from Houston to Cambridge and back. In fact, Mrs. Palmer liked travel by bus and discoursed cheerfully on the courtesy of her fellow passengers and the cleanliness of toilets wherever Greyhound made them available. But most of our conversation was about the many virtues of the Nash, which Archie had taken us to inspect after his mother and he returned from the inaugural ride on Route 128 earlier that day. I thought that the most striking of them—the reclining front seats that turned the car into a double bed—would not be mentioned, being the stuff of so many off-color jokes. I was wrong. Mrs. Palmer brought up the savings Archie could realize forgoing motels, if only he learned to travel with a sleeping bag. She seemed even more pleased by the power of the engine—or perhaps it was some ratio to the weight of the body. They had taken her up to ninety-five, miles I mean, Archie said, and he thought there was still some muscle to be flexed before the car reached its limit. And she’s solid, Mrs. Palmer added with a smile. If you’d been driving her in Panama, you wouldn’t have wound up on crutches, with a face like a scarecrow.

For some reason the reference to the Christmas events led Henry to ask how the colonel was adjusting—that is, I believe, the way he put it—to his duties in Korea.

He hates the place, said Mrs. Palmer, who wouldn’t? But he has his command, and that’s what matters to him.

Good for Pater, Archie exclaimed. Doesn’t that mean he’ll get his star?

They had better give it to him, Mrs. Palmer replied. They’ve made a fool of him long enough.

Colonel Palmer’s regiment was to suffer atrocious losses some weeks later, and the colonel himself was wounded. The promotion did come through, however, after he had been discharged from a stateside hospital and reassigned to Fort Benning. Military etiquette, or perhaps something more specific, compelled him to serve out a year in that post before retiring with his new rank. There was no need to hurry, as it turned out; the quantity of shrapnel that the surgeons were obliged to leave in his right leg made it quite impossible to play golf with the assiduity he had anticipated.

Clearly, Archie had not known that his father’s dream of commanding a regiment in combat had just come true. I supposed that, even without Henry’s polite inquiry, Mrs. Palmer would have eventually told him before she left Cambridge. But momentarily her not having said anything sooner—for instance while they were putting the Nash through its paces but before they hit ninety-five mph—took me aback. When I thought about it later I understood that it was the result of her single-minded concentration on Archie, in its way perhaps as obsessive as Mrs. White’s on Henry, although it manifested itself differently in most respects. Mrs. White was certainly interested in how Henry spent his time and with whom. She was downright nosy. I couldn’t detect in Mrs. Palmer any curiosity about Henry or me or any of the other friends who took up so much of Archie’s time; certainly none was revealed during the couple of hours she spent in our living room. She did, on the other hand, ask to see his martini shaker and tumblers—which he hadn’t taken out, as they were, in his opinion, not right for the bourbon on the rocks we were drinking—and his cigarette case. Perhaps she feared that he had hocked them, I thought at first, but it became clear when they were produced that she wanted to touch them because they were love offerings, tangible signs of her tenderness. Given her miserliness, about which Archie couldn’t stop talking, the emotional cost of those expensive objects must have been painfully high. Perhaps it made other forms of involvement with her son less urgent.

A
NUMBER OF THINGS
did not go well for Henry at the end of the spring semester. He took the rejection by the house hard, much harder than Archie, in part because he was convinced that Archie would have been admitted had he applied alone. I’m the Jewish monkey on his back, he said. I was convinced that the master’s class snobbery was more virulent than his anti-Semitism, but I didn’t say so to Henry. I believed that he’d rather be turned down as a Jew. Archie claimed that he couldn’t care less; the rooms at the Mount Auburn Street hall were larger and more agreeable than anything they could have gotten in the river house. Henry agreed but said that for the first time since having come to the United States he had been treated unfairly and had been left behind undeservedly.

Also, Henry was beginning to think that people he was drawn to—Archie and I, George and Margot, and a few others excepted—didn’t like him. The classics and other literature courses he was taking were full of preppies. He had assumed that shared academic interests would lead naturally to friendships, but nothing of the sort happened. I’m not one of them, he told me; they make it very clear. People taking the same course as he, whom he knew by name, would among themselves say, Let’s go for coffee. But the invitation never seemed to extend to him—or if it did it was without the clarity he thought he would have needed in order to accept comfortably. No one knocked on his door on the way to the movies, and no one tried to catch his eye as he looked for a table at which to sit down when he came to lunch or dinner at the Union. He had his meals with Archie or me or else alone, wherever a vacant seat could be found. In the way his instructors treated him when he approached the podium after class, there was none of the ease and cheerful give-and-take that other bright undergraduates of his caliber enjoyed. I wasn’t surprised. His instructors were, to a man, old preppies or wished they had been and were attracted instinctively, no less than Henry, to the style of their preppy students, only in Henry’s case without reciprocal feelings. If Henry had listened to his parents and taken premed courses, he would have been one more eager beaver surrounded by others, all just as brainy as he and no more socially acceptable. They would have liked him because he worked hard and was a nice guy. As for being friends with professors, it was a safe bet that no one expected or wanted to have a personal relationship with his organic or inorganic chemistry instructor.

Most painful was the change in his relationship with Margot. Ever since the evening on which they had gone to listen to Mabel Mercer, she had been letting him kiss her and fondle her breasts. He told me that he had made no attempt to do more. I want her to trust me, he said, I don’t want her to think that I am forcing her hand. The way we are now is better than anything I had expected, and I am still her best friend. If it was true what Bunny Rollins had told George about Margot, and George in turn related to me during our drive home from Stowe, perhaps Henry was wrong. Margot might have wished him to be more enterprising. I decided against telling him that. His feelings were too intense, and the risk too great of his turning on me if he thought that I lacked respect for Margot. At some point, perhaps in early April, Henry told me that Margot had put a stop to any physical contact between them; she had become too involved with someone else. Someone else turned out to be Etienne van Damme, the Belgian business school student. According to Henry, she had all but told him that she and the Belgian were having a real affair, conducted principally in New York, where van Damme would stay in a fancy hotel, and, when he or she had too much work to dash off to New York for the weekend, across the river, at his business school dormitory or at the Ritz in Boston. Henry claimed that he wasn’t jealous; she was still his long-term project and he had implicitly recognized that he would have successful rivals. He wondered, though, what had happened to their friendship. The Belgian had become her only topic of conversation.

Suddenly, the spring reading period was upon us. Right after exams, Henry was leaving for Grenoble and the French-language summer program. To Archie’s astonishment and mine, he mentioned casually that Margot would be staying at a big property the van Damme parents owned in the Ardennes, and that she and Etienne had invited him to spend a week with them. Archie planned to divide his summer between a coffee plantation in Brazil, in the state of São Paulo, and a couple of haciendas in Argentina, visiting rugby friends. George and I had decided to drive out west and then return to the Berkshires via the Southwest and South.