Matters of Honor (16 page)

What’s going on? he asked.

I told him as much as I knew how. I had been waiting for that question to be asked by the right person.

XIV

F
EAR AND DESPAIR FOLLOWED
. Sent by Tom to the university health services, I found myself several days later once again in a room decorated with execrable Harvardiana—on the walls two class banners, ’37 and ’42, assorted pennants, a group photograph of the football team, and engraved views of Sever, Emerson Hall, and Sanders in thick black frames, Harvard chairs, and Harvard ashtrays—talking to the pipe-smoking university psychiatrist, Dr. Winters. He had reviewed the tests, he told me, and the notes of two previous interviews. There was no doubt about my condition: I had hit a bad bump and was still in an uncontrolled skid. I didn’t reply. After a couple of puffs, he spoke again, and said that I was a sick young man. I was, however, far from the scrap yard. My ailment, while serious, was closer to a mild than to a severe depression. With intensive treatment I should be able to get back on the road. I asked whether this meant I had to be in a hospital. Not necessarily, he answered. Let’s talk about the treatment after you’ve seen the dean. At University Hall, the dean in charge of my case, a nice man who also smoked a pipe, told me that I had been placed on medical leave. Suddenly, I felt bereft. What was to become of me? I didn’t protest but asked whether I would be allowed to return and how long it would be. I was hoping that he hadn’t noticed that I trembled.

Mr. Standish, he told me, you have to be realistic. You aren’t up to doing the work. You’re not taking care of yourself. There’s no point in your being here while you’re in this condition. Come back when you are well. He added that he would be in touch with the senior tutor of my house. Though crushed, I couldn’t help thinking that he was right.

It turned out that the dean didn’t stop at notifying Tom Peabody. Without any warning he called my parents, a betrayal that rankled, although when Tom, whose patience I thought might be wearing thin, observed that I couldn’t have imagined that they would be left in the dark, I had no answer other than to repeat querulously that he should have spoken to me first. So they came down to Cambridge and joined in the debate about where to put me away. What to do about the crazy son? My father’s presence was particularly loathsome. I disliked his long fingers, pale and freckled just like mine, drumming on the table, his polite and pedantic diction, and his eyes, pale blue like mine, that tried to smile but were to me the eyes of a drunk in which I could always discern the little blood vessels no matter how much Murine had washed across them. The rage he put me in was a distraction from my mother and, although I did not then realize it, from the void Dr. Winters was opening before me. He too was not to be trusted. To hear him, now that he’d gotten an audience, and all three of them had me by the balls, the only choice I had was among hospitals. I suspected that he had a list a yard long, but there were three he favored: McLean, in Belmont, just outside of Cambridge, Silver Hill in Connecticut, and, of all places, Austen Riggs Center, in Stockbridge. I said I wouldn’t go to any of them. McLean was a place of straitjackets and electric shock therapy; the name alone filled me with dread. I had scorn for the other two, Silver Hill because of tales I had heard of alcoholics sent there to dry out who returned after long sojourns only to hit the bottle—in fact, at one time, my mother had badgered my father to check in there—and Riggs because, in Berkshires folklore, it was a place for rich crackpots and wastrels hiding from husbands, wives, children, and other sundry obligations. I didn’t want to be known as a Riggs patient, and I didn’t budge when Dr. Winters changed tack and began to tell me that perhaps I could be an outpatient there. My parents hadn’t much to say about any of this, and they shut up altogether when Riggs was named. I saw through them. It wouldn’t have been at all convenient to have me there. In any other loony bin, I would be out of sight and, as they might hope, out of mind. George’s parents would know, because of George, but they wouldn’t carry tales about their son’s rescuer. Especially since they might think it was all his fault. So we were at an impasse, because neither the doctor nor my parents seemed to have any stomach for having me locked up against my will. Perhaps it couldn’t be done and they knew it. Tom, whom I had begun once more to consider the only person I could trust, came up with a solution. I would remain in Cambridge and live off campus under the care of a local psychiatrist. He got both the dean and Dr. Winters to agree to the principle, and then came up with the psychiatrist and the lodging. By the end of the week after Thanksgiving, I had become a paying boarder at the house of Madame Shouvaloff in De Wolfe Street and a patient of Dr. Jacob Reiner. As my parents were leaving, I told them I wouldn’t be home for Christmas.

A long time into my analysis, Tom Peabody, whose store of gossip was inexhaustible, told me something of my analyst’s personal history. He had preceded his mentor, Dr. Freud, into exile and was living in London at the time of the
Anschluss.
With Freud dead and the war likely to spread, he decided that New York would be a better refuge. Dr. Brill and other influential friends at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute pulled strings enabling him to obtain a visa for himself and his wife and, in 1940, he was already taking licensing examinations and conducting training analyses at the Institute. Around that time, Frau Dr. Reiner decided to go her separate way with a widowed Viennese art dealer. It was just as well, since Dr. Reiner was about to acquire an interesting patient: Grace Leffingwell, a young and ethereal descendant of Henry Clay Frick. It might have been more seemly not to personalize the relationship until Grace’s analysis had been brought to completion. The end, however, wasn’t in sight, and Dr. Reiner made his move, winning Grace’s heart and hand to the horror of her family and the New York psychoanalytical establishment. The new Mrs. Reiner, married to a Jew, was promptly thrown out of the Junior League and dropped from the Social Register, the latter indignity being, in Tom’s opinion, comical, since the New York Social Register was only slightly more exclusive than the telephone directory. The trusts and the money, however, couldn’t be snatched away from Grace by the irate Leffingwells and Fricks. More to the point, those millions, and the family connections even if they were strained, had an intimidating effect on Dr. Reiner’s colleagues: there was no move to sever his connection with the Institute. Even so, he no longer found the New York professional scene congenial. An affiliation with the Harvard Medical School became available, and a psychiatrist, who had trained in Vienna and was practicing in Cambridge, had an opening for Grace as a patient. The move to new quarters on Sparks Street was completed with the kind of dispatch that only the possession of a great fortune makes possible.

The brick house at the corner of Highland and Sparks Streets, where I went every morning at ten Monday through Friday, was remarkable only for its gleaming black shutters. The waiting room was reached by a separate side entrance. From there, a leather-padded door led to the office. Dr. Reiner required absolute punctuality. One arrived on the hour; the session began immediately and was over in fifty minutes flat. The point was to pick up one’s coat and any other belongings from the waiting room and leave before the next patient arrived. In my case the system failed only once. Arriving a minute or two early I met in the waiting room the wife of my odious housemaster. She was just leaving. I bowed and said hello. She returned my greeting absently. I didn’t mention the contretemps to Dr. Reiner.

I wonder whether psychoanalysis has ever helped one become like the people one envies and admires, who have power to hurt and will do none, husbanding nature’s riches from expense, secure in their knowledge of what life owes them. For instance, George Standish. Dr. Reiner did not turn me into a more intellectual George, and gradually I came to understand that such was not his ambition. During two weeks or so I sat in a straight chair, his desk between us, and gave rambling confused answers to questions about my family. I have always had a tendency to ramble; for once I wasn’t obliged to keep it in check. Then the drill changed: I lay on a couch like the one in Freud’s study in Vienna, a large framed photograph of which hung above me, Dr. Reiner off to the side where I couldn’t see him, and tried to connect words to dreams I was teaching myself to remember. Dr. Reiner had warned me that he would speak only “to get me into the right lane on the highway.” Except for the occasional “this needs more work” and the few times when I asked to speak to him as though we were two normal human beings, that turned out to be all. He wasn’t silent, however: he whistled nonstop, almost noiselessly, what I thought was invariably the same tune. One day, while I lay still, my head empty, unable to speak, I recognized it: “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” A feeling of outrage overcame me. I sat up and yelled, For Christ’s sake, stop whistling. Oh, he answered, you have noticed. I will stop.

Had he been goading me? I came to think it must be so; the whistling had to be voluntary. If it were a real tic, beyond his control, I reasoned, he wouldn’t have replied as he had. Finally, I asked him. The question was futile. He threw it back at me with What do you think? Equally futile was a question I put to him later, at a time of mounting frustration with my utter lack of progress: What makes you think, I said, that you can understand me? You can’t. You weren’t brought up here; you learned your English at school; you’re a Jew. I sat up and stared him in the face. He didn’t smile or frown. That’s all beside the point, he told me. Getting to the bottom of your problems is your job; I’m only directing traffic. Then he tittered. I yelled at him a second time: I hope I never hear a shrink use another goddamn automobile metaphor so long as I live. Why don’t you apes learn how to talk! He said nothing. I got up from the sofa and left without saying goodbye, a good twenty-five minutes of my hour remaining. Hayes-Bickford, where I went for coffee, was deserted. There wasn’t a soul I knew left in Cambridge. Everybody, Tom Peabody included, had left for the spring break. It was too early to go to the movies. Instead, I walked for hours, retracing the itinerary Henry had followed after he had met Margot at Mario’s party, although I avoided Sparks Street. The next morning I was back in Dr. Reiner’s consultation room. He didn’t reprove me, and I didn’t say I was sorry; we resumed whatever it was we were doing. In obedience to him I hadn’t gone near
The Interpretation of Dreams
or any other work on psychoanalysis. The previous day, however, during my walk, it occurred to me that perhaps the question I had put to Dr. Reiner about his undertaking to analyze a fine flower of New England like me was stupid. Wasn’t it likely that from his point of view the development of neuroses was governed by quasi-mechanical rules that applied generally, so that cultural differences between him and me, although interesting, didn’t matter very much? I tried this insight on him some sessions later. He told me we weren’t there to discuss theories.

At the end of July, Dr. Reiner left for his usual summer vacation on the Cape. I didn’t even think to ask him whether we had finished. Some weeks earlier, I had reminded him that the deadline for letting the college know whether I would be returning in the fall was upon us and asked his opinion. The question, he replied, was whether I would like to return. I said I would. But was he able to give me the sort of document about my health that would satisfy the dean’s office?

Back to college in September, he mused. That’s soon, Mr. Standish. All the same, if you want to do it, I think you should.

I said that I was getting better.

Everything is relative, he replied. I’d rather say that your approach to your problems has been changing in a positive direction. You need to keep up the momentum. I recommend that you remain in treatment, certainly so long as you are at the college. Perhaps later as well.

I asked whether it would be five times a week.

He nodded. Yes, with me or another qualified therapist.

And when will it be over? I asked again.

I can’t tell you, he answered. Most likely, you will be the first to know.

A part of the answer was what I had hoped for: it meant that I wouldn’t be set adrift. Although by this time I knew that Dr. Reiner was more expensive than the two other psychiatrists on the university’s referral list, I decided to remain with him. Mr. Hibble didn’t seem to mind, and I was glad to think that was all I really needed to worry about.

I spent the month of August at Madame Shouvaloff’s reading French novels and listening to stories she told in French of her late husband, a favorite in the tsar’s corps of pages, who escaped from Russia in the course of some movement of a White division across Siberia. Further improbable adventures brought him to Harvard, where he coached the fencing team. Her own family, she told me, was no less grand than the late prince’s. She was a Karouguine. I might have liked to remain her lodger, but Tom Peabody’s wiles secured for me again the single suite in O entry. During my absence he had used it to lodge visiting lecturers attached to the house. Those two rooms of my own tipped the scale against reminiscences told over glasses of tea with raspberry preserves redolent of Russia.

XV

I
T IS TIME
I brought Henry back onstage.

Tom Peabody’s promise—in the end I interpreted it as such—was made good; in the fall of their junior year Henry and Archie moved into the house. I was back in my old quarters, as a sophomore, readjusting to college life. It wasn’t long before the old intimacy between Henry and me was reestablished. We saw each other at meals and often late in the evening in my room. Henry liked to stop by. If I had finished my work and wasn’t asleep, we talked, sometimes past midnight. On one such evening soon after the beginning of the semester he asked me, out of the blue—unless it was apropos of the course in Jacobean drama I was taking—whether I had ever heard of a fin de siècle French playwright called Alfred Jarry or his play
Ubu Roi,
both of which he said were very famous. He spelled Jarry and Ubu. I shook my head.

That’s too bad, he said, Jarry and
Ubu
are the great discoveries I made at Bayencourt.

Seeing that I was puzzled, he reminded me that he had spoken as long ago as April of the job that Etienne van Damme’s parents had offered him at Bayencourt, the name of their château and of the Ardennes village above which it perched. He was to teach English to their nephews and nieces starting on the first of July until early September, when he would have to leave to register for classes. I confessed that I had forgotten. It turned out, he continued, that also staying at Bayencourt was Mr. van Damme’s much younger brother Denis, the director of the national theater in Brussels. One evening, after his pupils had gone to bed, he was in the library of the château, a room he had been encouraged to use. He had before him on the table a volume of plays by Plautus and a Latin dictionary he was consulting. Seeing that I was smiling, Henry quickly assured me that he wasn’t doing it for show; he was really trying to get a head start on a seminar he knew he would be taking. Denis had looked over his shoulder and said he had a distinct recollection of
Menaechni,
the play to which Henry’s book was open. They began to talk about the theater generally, and Denis asked what he thought of Jarry. When Henry replied that he had never heard of him, Denis said this was a lacuna that should be filled; he was sure Jarry’s works were on the bookshelf with other
J
s, his brother being a stickler for strict alphabetical order by author. Indeed, in no time at all he had handed Henry the volume containing
Ubu Roi,
saying it was Jarry’s masterpiece. They would talk after Henry had read it.

Henry put Plautus away and plunged into
Ubu.
He read in bed. The French gave him no trouble except for the strings of epithets, many of them obscene, the meaning of which he had to guess, not having in his room an adequate dictionary, and the puns, some of which he realized were plain beyond him. The next day, Denis asked what he thought. Henry replied without hesitation that he had been dazzled. That’s as I had hoped, Denis told him. I’m glad to have introduced you to Jarry. He’s the point of departure for everything important in avant-garde twentieth-century theater that followed
Ubu,
including the work of Brecht. The point Jarry put across definitively is that to pretend that what happens on the stage is real is not the best way to evoke reality. It can be done more convincingly if you make manifest to the audience that they are looking at a performance—at actors who are performers presenting personages in the play and not those personages themselves, and that the space in which the action takes place is a stage, and not the castle at Elsinore or some bourgeois drawing room.

There is a need for distance between the actor and the role, Denis told me. No one in the audience can possibly believe a performance of
Ubu
replicates the way in which events actually unfolded. Its analogue is the “Mousetrap,” the play within a play in
Hamlet:
“the image of a murder done in Vienna.” No one in the audience—neither in the theater’s seats nor in the crucial audience on the stage, King Claudius and Queen Gertrude—believes for a moment that the players are the Duke Gonzago, his murderous brother, or his unfaithful queen, but for that very reason the point is gotten across all the more powerfully.

True, I said, but what about the play
Hamlet
in which it’s lodged,
Hamlet
itself?

It’s the same thing, he answered impatiently. You don’t suppose for a minute that the audience in the real theater’s seats believe that the man in a black Renaissance costume wearing a blond wig and declaiming gorgeous lines, much of the time to himself, is the prince of Denmark!

As you can imagine, Henry continued, what Denis said then and on several other occasions made quite an impression on me. I went on to read Brecht plays in a French translation that Denis had his assistant send from Brussels, as well as the plays of Apollinaire and Cocteau, which were in Mr. van Damme’s library. Denis was right. Jarry was some sort of flash-in-the-pan genius. All the same, I’m not sure that I would have paid so much attention to him or what Denis had to say about the theater—however interesting—if I hadn’t been hooked by
le père
Ubu, this Falstaff without charm, obese, gluttonous, cowardly, and totally cruel. Naturally cruel. He is a mercenary soldier in the service of Wenceslas, the king of Poland. By the way, I don’t know whether Jarry knew the Christmas carol, though he surely knew Czech history, and Jarry’s Wenceslas is that kind of king, a good Saint Wenceslas. Ubu seizes power and kills him, crowning himself king. Then he slaughters Polish nobles and tax collectors, as well as his own chief coconspirator, and bleeds the country dry. He applies to Poland pataphynancial principles—that’s one of Jarry’s inventions—hilarious and fraudulent nonsense that you wouldn’t be surprised to see written up on the front page of the
Times.
Then it’s Ubu’s turn to be overthrown. You can see that the plot is all nonsense and I won’t say any more about it. The odd thing is that somehow all the Polish business struck me as wonderfully apt—inspired. It was my Poland and my Poles. A jolly gang. And that was the hook.

Would you like to read
Ubu?
he asked me. If you would, I have it right in my book bag, in the original and in English. I did a translation in Bayencourt. Denis thinks it’s publishable—if ever I find someone interested in Jarry.

I said that of course I’d read the play.

He rummaged in the bag and extracted from it a beautiful little volume in a leather binding, which he said was Denis’ own copy given to him as a parting gift, and the typescript of the translation.

You’ll have fun, he said. I have decided to stage
Ubu.
When you read it, you will see why and you will also think that I’ll need a cast and sets on the order of
Birth of a Nation.
But that’s not true. The first performance by real actors—real professionals—was at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in 1896, with W. B. Yeats of all people in the audience. When the curtain went down, there was a big brawl; many in the audience found the play and the performance utterly outrageous and shocking. What’s interesting from my point of view is that
Ubu
had been successfully performed prior to that time by amateurs using marionettes, and there have been marionette performances since, in regular theaters. I want to do it in the patio of the Fogg. It’s the perfect setting; not too big and not too small, and I love the irony of the Renaissance setting for this pseudo-medieval farce. I don’t see why undergraduates can’t do as well as marionettes, provided the right puppeteer pulls the strings. That will be my job. I’ll direct and I suppose I’ll produce, unless someone else on the same wavelength and frequency volunteers.

I asked Henry whether he’d gone off his rocker.

By way of an answer, he pulled out of his book bag a notebook full of production notes, sketches, and stage directions, and talked about his plans so convincingly that I began to think that this might just be yet another seemingly impossible undertaking that he would somehow pull off.

I wished him luck and asked whether Margot had also been at Bayencourt. I had not seen her since our freshman year, and whatever Henry had told me about her during the winter and spring of my illness I had forgotten.

He hesitated and said that he wanted to make it very clear that the van Dammes had hired him because of the impression he had made on them during his short previous visit as someone who could get their gang of six- to eleven-year-olds to become interested in speaking English and actually doing it—a crazy idea, since the result might be a gang of little Belgians speaking with a Polish accent, but nevertheless it was their idea—and neither Etienne nor Margot had intervened. A couple of times Etienne had come to the château from Brussels, where he was working for the utility holding company controlled by the family. Margot hadn’t appeared at all. He thought she had spent the summer with her parents in London and the south of France. He didn’t know whether Etienne had gone to visit her.

In that case, I observed, they must have broken up. Henry answered that he didn’t know; neither Margot nor Etienne had told him anything.

I
NEEDN’T HAVE WORRIED
that Henry would feel himself an interloper in the house dining room and perhaps be treated as such. Over the course of his sophomore year, although he and Archie were still living in exile on Mount Auburn Street, he had climbed the house social ladder, reaching one of the higher rungs to which an intellectual or an aesthete who hadn’t gone to the right school could aspire. He was on easy terms with Tom Peabody and the other younger tutors and didn’t hesitate to sit down beside them at lunch or dinner. It was more surprising to see him at a table Tom called the Parnassus, the fiefdom of a coterie consisting mostly of juniors with heavy pretensions to culture whose conversation was a potpourri of anecdotes concerning the Lunts, Cole Porter, Wystan Auden, Thornton Wilder, General Marshall, Ruth Draper, and various other luminaries, all of them—General Marshall excepted—referred to by first name. They had been friends since kindergarten and had all been to the right schools or, in any event, to schools that were acceptable. I had gone with Tom Peabody to see Jerome Robbins’s ballet
The Cage
in New York. The attractiveness, cohesion, and fundamental hostility toward outsiders of Parnassus made me think of Robbins’s endogamic insects; a foppish junior by the name of Ralph Wilmerding, to whom I took an instant dislike that I hoped was not induced by envy, was clearly their carnivorous insect queen.

I was friends with another member of the coterie, a senior called Jack Merton, who was in my small creative writing class. A rich orphan from San Francisco, he was probably the only undergraduate to wear day in and day out gray worsted suits and brown brogues, in preference to the standard ratty tweed jacket, chinos, and loafers. His Chevy convertible was parked and kept spotlessly clean at Mrs. McCartney’s garage right off Harvard Square; one of his two leggy girlfriends was at Sarah Lawrence, the other at Vassar. He gave them equal time, spending alternate weekends with one in New York and with the other at his house on Narragansett Bay. The poetry he wrote was convoluted and sometimes precious, but I liked it better than anything else that was written in our class, and I liked him. I sat down occasionally at the Parnassian table when Merton had an empty chair beside him. This initiative let Henry off the hook; he didn’t have to decide whether he was in good enough standing to introduce me. In fact Tom Peabody’s frequent presence at the table, especially at lunch, would have given me sufficient entrée, had I wished it.

Henry’s apparent friendship with these men, none of whom he had known when we were freshmen, mystified me. I asked Henry whether they could possibly be friends of Archie’s. He laughed and assured me that they weren’t. Then he told me rather airily that it was quite simple: he had found them attractive, more attractive than anyone else in the house, and had taken advantage of an occasion when Tom was at their table and there was room for one more. Then one thing led to another, and he was thinking that a couple of them—he named Wilmerding and his acolyte, Scott Allen—might want to be involved in his production of
Ubu.
There was no way he could do it all alone. I was surprised, but not much later I attended, in Wilmerding’s living room, what Wilmerding called an organizational meeting for Henry’s and his
Ubu
project.

S
HORTLY BEFORE
that afternoon, Henry was putting up notices in all the houses announcing the audition for
Ubu
—to run an ad in the
Crimson
was in his opinion a waste of money. There was an oversize sophomore with a stentorian voice and a tendency to pontificate whom he had been observing here and there with an eye to casting him as Ubu, and he had ideas about the two other principal male characters, Capitaine Bordure, Ubu’s adjutant whose name Henry translated as Gagarbage, and the young son of the king of Poland, Bougrelas, or Buggerson in Henry’s version. Wilmerding had not yet told him whether he liked those choices, but Henry saw no reason why he shouldn’t, and anyway wasn’t going to waste time talking to him about it. It took an eternity for Wilmerding to make up his mind about anything. Perhaps he was preternaturally careful. The other role still to be cast was
la mère
Ubu, a gross personage, as fat and repulsive as her husband. There were enough girls at Radcliffe, he remarked, who fit that description, but, as he was not after method actors, he wondered whether a beautiful girl who could act might not be more effective if she could convey obesity and grossness notwithstanding her real appearance. It was worth a try.

Margot, for instance? I asked.

We were walking back to the house from the Widener. Henry stopped to retie the laces of his tennis shoes and asked me to wait. When he straightened up he said that he wasn’t sure where he stood with Margot. It was a complicated business. I suggested we talk about it over a cup of tea at Hayes-Bickford. We took a table in the back, Henry wanting to be sure that we weren’t overheard. He drank his tea in a couple of gulps and looking away from me said he was sure it was wrong to say what he was about to tell me, but, at the same time, he had to talk to someone. Archie was out of the question so it came down to me. Jarry and
Ubu Roi
were not his only once-in-a-lifetime experiences at Bayencourt, he said. There was something much more grave and extraordinary. Something between Madame van Damme and him.