Matters of Honor (26 page)

So may I count on you? he asked as we parted. I said I would be delighted.

That is how I found myself under the command of Henry in a strange platoon of assorted Verplancks, Phippses, and Voorhises greeting Admiral and Frau von Holberg’s guests at St. Ignatius Loyola, and later dancing with Alma’s oversexed Latino maids of honor, every one of them, I had been told, a certified virgin. It had fallen to me to escort Archie’s mother to her pew. Desiccated and hunched over, the general’s wife had aged less well than he. She no longer had the optimistic bounce of a registered nurse; now she looked more like an old lady waiting for a bus in some small town terminal, clasping a huge black pocketbook from which no force on earth could separate her. At the Colony Club the last guests had just made their way through the receiving line when we were called to attention by a roll of the drums, and the bandleader’s cry of Olé! Olé! We all turned toward the dance floor and saw Mrs. Palmer make her way to the bandstand. She said something in Spanish to the bandleader that caused him to give her a handheld portable microphone. The drums were heard once again as she searched in that pocketbook. Finally, she found the sheet of paper she had been looking for, settled a different pair of glasses on her nose, and began to read. I was expecting a toast, although it was not the usual time for the mother of the groom to speak. In fact Mrs. Palmer was saying that if we would look through the windows on Park Avenue, we would be able to admire the automobile she had given Archie as a wedding present. She hoped he and Alma would have fun in it on their honeymoon road trip. Appearances are misleading, she continued. This baby may look like your ordinary Mercedes convertible, but she’s got an engine with twice as many horses champing at the bits. That is why I also offered Archie, when he last visited his old mother in Texas, a week of car racing instruction. Happy flying!

The band struck up “La Cucaracha,” and Archie did the box step with his mother, who turned out to be very nimble, while all the Latinos—men, women, and virgins—spontaneously formed a circle around them and clapped hands in time with the music. I followed Mrs. Palmer’s precept and took a peek at her offering. It was fire-engine red and very beautiful. When it came to presents, she certainly had style.

Some time passed after the wedding without any word from Archie. Probably I didn’t notice; I don’t recall discussing his silence with Henry. Then one day after a lunchtime game with the club pro, I ran into one of the other ushers, Bill Voorhis, whom I knew vaguely from college.

Perfectly horrible, he said to me, when I think of that wedding, and how much fun we all had.

What can you mean? I asked.

Don’t you know? he replied.

He went on to tell me that Archie and Alma got to Denver by plane and were reunited with the Mercedes, which had been shipped by train. Someone brought it to their hotel right before lunch. They went out to inspect it and afterward, as Voorhis put it, had one of those Archie lunches. When they finished, he took Alma for a spin. Fifty miles on, they were both dead, crushed against a beer truck on a blind turn.

I told Voorhis that I felt sick.

We all did after the general’s call, he replied, but what else could you expect? The general reached Phipps first, and then Phipps called the rest. A couple of us went out there to help with taking the bodies to Buenos Aires. That’s what the Holbergs wanted, and the general agreed. That’s right, he added, I guess there’s no way you could have known. Poor Archie didn’t rate an obituary.

I had lunch alone in the grillroom. Afterward, I stepped into the telephone booth in the front hall of the club, shut the door behind me, and dialed Henry’s number. He was on the phone, but I told the receptionist that I would wait. Finally he came on and I told him. There was a long silence. That was, I realized, how Henry grieved until such time as some dam inside him would break.

So there it was. Henry didn’t know the Union Club gang, and no one—not even General or Mrs. Palmer—had bothered to call him any more than me, so completely had Archie’s life changed. It wasn’t as though Archie himself had come to feel less close to Henry. He had asked him to be his best man, and not Voorhis or Phipps. But to the general and the pillars of Archie’s backgammon set, Henry was as good as invisible, some misfit poor old Archie had been stuck with at college. After I got home I thought of Phoebe. It was more or less the hour when she would be leaving for work. I got her right away but couldn’t bring myself to get to the reason for my call. We chatted. She was with an English journalist who refused to get a divorce, but most of the time the wife stayed in London and let him live as he pleased in Paris. Did I know any single men, she asked, who weren’t queer and wanted to get married? I said they had discontinued that model, and then, without more beating about the bush, I gave her the news.

XXV

A
RCHIE HAD BEEN RIGHT
about one thing: Henry’s social life. Perhaps getting into the Union or the Racquet Club or one of the smaller and even more exclusive institutions that Archie himself had not yet managed to join would have been a big help. He would have been able, when lonely, to seek shelter and company at the club bar and the members’ dinner table. Perhaps he would have acquired a taste for the ambient conversation and by and by become a desirable extra, a man in demand among the wives to whose husbands he lost at backgammon. Except that he would have found it hard not to win.

Certainly, he had the cultural riches of New York at his disposal. But the peonage in which New York law firms like his held associates—at partners’ beck and call at any hour of the day or night, weekends and holidays included—made going to a movie, play, or concert frustratingly difficult, unless one went alone or someone was always available, resigned to last-minute cancellations and good-natured about them. That was usually a long-suffering wife. Many of Henry’s colleagues had them as well as children in various stages of teething and toilet training, and those with money of their own also had nannies to push the prams, change the diapers, give the bottle, and otherwise keep the little angels out of their parents’ hair. That did not mean, however, that they were apt to rush off to see a Broadway show and say to themselves, Wouldn’t old Henry like to come along. Much more likely, as part of a round-robin of invitations exchanged within the inbred and hermetically closed world of posh law firms and investment banks, they would be giving or attending a refined little dinner at the apartment of some other young couple on the Upper East Side or possibly the Upper West Side. The table would be aglow with wedding-present linen, silver, crystal, and china, a display of which poor Mrs. White herself would have approved. The martini glasses having been twice filled and twice emptied, the hostess and the most enterprising of the other husbands would serve the meal: six times out of ten, it consisted of stuffed quail, wild rice, Brie (small slices of which had already appeared on Norwegian flat bread as hors d’oeuvres), and, for dessert, perhaps a fruit tart purchased at Dumas on Lexington Avenue, all washed down with more Beaujolais than was good for anyone. Scotch and soda and Cognac followed. It didn’t matter all that much if one of the husbands—even the host!—had found himself stuck at the office or, having gone to the printer to proofread changes in some registration statement, missed the party and didn’t appear at home until dawn, just in time to shave, change his shirt, and head back to the office. The good-sport supergirl he had married would cope, just as she coped with everything that stood in the way of living like Mommy and Daddy. Meanwhile, the men lucky enough to have a night away from the office would exchange tall stories about deals they were on, the billable hours they had racked up the previous week or month and since the beginning of the year, the eccentricities of partners they worked for, and, if all other similar subjects had been exhausted, the finer points of opinions rendered to lenders in secured financings. They took stock of one another, as it was a close and unsettling question which form of chic was higher: to have come directly from downtown, bearing a Peal’s attaché case heavy with documents to be studied and marked up before the sun rose (as though any such thing could be accomplished after the second after-dinner whiskey or Cognac) or to have stopped at home and slipped into a pretty Jermyn Street shirt and blue blazer from Anderson & Sheppard.

Of course, Henry could count on George and Edie to invite him to their little dinners. They invariably did, George explained to me, because Edie was so fond of him, fully as much as he. It was she, in fact, who had first thought of asking him to be an usher at their wedding. Otherwise, he wouldn’t push her to have him over, that sort of thing being really better left to women, particularly if someone is as hard to place as Henry.

I expressed some surprise that he didn’t think Henry an easy fit.

It’s a bunch of factors, he said. Edie likes the table to be balanced, which is fair enough, and Henry never seems able to bring a date. I don’t understand it. I can’t believe that he doesn’t know any girls, or that he’s ashamed to show us the ones he’s seeing. We’ve tried to fix him up with Edie’s cousin Mary and a couple of the girls Edie went to school with, including the Adams girl who was in the wedding, but it didn’t work. We were really counting on Mary. She’s always been a great reader, so they should have hit it off. He took her out once or twice after we placed them next to each other at dinner, but that was all. Edie suspects he came on too strong too soon. I don’t believe he even called those other girls.

I asked how Henry got along at the office, and why, in a firm as large as Wiggins & O’Reilly, there wasn’t some sort of social life for him to plunge into.

One thing you don’t need to worry about is how Henry’s doing at the firm, George answered very seriously. Mr. Allen uses him all the time. That alone means a lot because he is a real taskmaster. And he’s very powerful. Henry does work for Jim Hershey too. That is, when Hershey happens to be around. He travels all the time for his international clients. People say that in his wily way Hershey keeps an eye on Henry, and he’s very powerful too. But this is all outside of my little department so I’m only repeating what I’ve heard.

George was in trusts and estates, while Henry did fancy corporate work. The two worlds hardly met. Nonetheless, I renewed my question: Even if all this is true, why should Henry be lonely after work?

That’s a different question, George said. We don’t have much organized social life at Wiggins, no monthly cocktail parties the way they do it at other firms. All we have is one dinner for all lawyers in the winter and one in June. People organize their own lives. Partners hardly ever invite associates. I’m sure that the Allens have him to dinner when they need an extra man, he’s practically Mr. Allen’s slave. Perhaps Hershey takes him to dinner at his club. Mrs. Hershey had polio after they were married, and she’s in a wheelchair. I don’t think they ever entertain at home. As for associates, I don’t know that he’s all that close to anyone. Maybe that’s because he’s just too busy or maybe the other two guys we hired from his law school class, Forrester and Lovett, and he have never been especially friendly. To be honest, I never knew who his friends were. I only happen to know those two fellows because we were at school together.

As I pondered this, I recalled George’s attempt to get Henry into his law school eating club, an embarrassing initiative for George that miscarried.

What happens usually at the firm, George explained, is that unmarried associates from the same class, or in the same small group like trusts and estates, hang out together, have parties at their apartments, and so on. Some are good cooks. They have roommates, which makes entertaining easier. I don’t know why Henry doesn’t at least have a roommate. His apartment’s all right. He had us to drinks soon after he moved in, with Margot of all people. That could have been hairy, but I think she and I both handled it well. I’m probably talking through my hat, but I’ve heard it said that Henry was brought in because Jim Hershey went to the hiring partner and said hire him. Why he’d do that, I don’t know, but the rumor doesn’t do Henry any good. The fact is that I don’t even remember his being interviewed. I know Edie asked her old man to arrange it, but he said he’d tried and found out there was nothing he could do. If Henry had been interviewed, the guy in charge of his schedule would ask whether he had friends among associates at the firm and take him around to visit them. Wouldn’t I have been one of them? So there might be something to the theory that he came in over the transom. That’s in addition to what you and I know, which is that even with all his brains and energy and law review he isn’t exactly the sort of fellow you think of as Wiggins & O’Reilly material.

I knew that. I also knew—and perhaps George as well—the larger history of Henry’s job search, which was hardly typical of someone who graduated close to the top of his law school class. The summer between his first and second years was spent winding up his father’s affairs, as he had predicted the evening we went to Margot’s apartment. Any free time he had he spent with Margot. But it was the following summer that was crucial. Henry applied to five or six of the leading New York firms, basing his views of excellence on scuttlebutt and comments posted at the law review. That meant that he was going against the opinion shared by every Jew he knew at the law school, including his classmates on the review, that these were the firms that didn’t take Jews except in the rarest cases, usually involving sons of the highest German Jewish bourgeoisie. But even these special Jews, once hired, were denied partnership, with one known exception. That was the case of Augustus Stern, an Albright & Kinsolving partner, brilliant and universally known as the least Jewish of Jews, who was the cousin by marriage of the family that owned the grandest of the Jewish investment banks and grew up, as Mr. Bowditch liked to put it, to be the master of hounds at one of the South Jersey hunts. Henry insisted that with a part of his brain he knew that all this was true. But something in him rebelled against worldly wisdom: This is a free country, he said to himself, I won’t be like those fatalistic American primitives in basic training at Fort Dix with their motto: “Fuck me, I’ll never smile again.” You, George, Archie, and Margot, you’ve all sold me on the American dream, he told me at Henri IV, where I had taken him to lunch in the fall of his third year at the law school. I was in Cambridge, visiting Tom Peabody.

I remarked that I wouldn’t have expected to find Margot on that list.

What do you mean, he answered, she let me through the door I most wanted to enter!

I asked him to go on with his saga.

Oddly enough, he said, of the five firms that had interviewed him in New York only one wanted to hire him, the one he liked least, full of Irishmen dressed up like lawyers, probably all firemen or policemen in real life. They must have made a mistake; mixed him up with O’Boyle or Sweeney. Anyway, he’d be damned if he was going to accept their offer. Not when there were Jewish firms in New York full of partners and associates with better academic records than anyone in the firms he had set his heart on, any one of which would be thrilled to have him. But the heart has its reasons: he thought that if he took that route he would be diminished in our eyes. What would I, Archie, George, or Margot think if he, a free spirit, with zero interest in being Jewish, bowed his head and moved into the ghetto? Mr. Hornung came to the rescue and rendered the question moot by inviting him to spend the summer at the bank as his assistant. He even made a trip to Boston to put this proposition to me personally, Henry said, although his bank doesn’t recruit lawyers and he certainly doesn’t travel to recruit a glorified office boy. Just picking up the telephone would have sealed the deal.

Both the proposal and Mr. Hornung’s interest in his career surprised Henry; a third surprise was that he hadn’t heard a word about it from Margot. She had enrolled at the École du Louvre and was living in Paris, and her father hadn’t told her. When Henry got over the shock, he concluded he must have found favor with this powerful rich man who had so terrified him and almost certainly did not know anything of the nature of his relations with Margot. Grasping at the golden straw, he took the job. At the end of the summer came another surprise: Mr. Hornung took him to lunch at La Côte Basque and advised him to get his law degree, take a long vacation, and then return to the bank. He assured Henry that he had a far better head for business than he might think and would be making the mistake of his life if he didn’t put it to work. Henry thanked him with all the warmth he dared show. Then he explained that, contrary to his expectations, it had turned out that he liked the law and was able to do well at law school. He was determined to give practice a try. Mr. Hornung nodded and said he was disappointed. Margot would probably be disappointed as well—it was the first time he had mentioned her to Henry. But in his own case, disappointed or not, he wouldn’t be discouraged; the offer would remain open. Unless, he added, he sold the bank. Henry permitted himself to ask what would happen to his prospects in such an event. Mr. Hornung chuckled and said that solutions might be found.

I too found this denouement startling. What will you do now? I asked, remembering from George’s case that there soon would be another round of recruiting for permanent positions in law firms.

Actually, I have my eye on two Supreme Court clerkships, he said, with Frankfurter or Harlan. The trouble is that they don’t take clerks straight out of law school. You have to clerk on a court of appeals first, and very few court of appeals judges interest me. Really there is only one, Henry Friendly in New York. If that doesn’t work out, I guess I’ll apply to the same five law firms. Just to see whether the Irish still want me.

Our lunch had taken more time than I had expected. I was to have dinner with Tom Peabody, which meant dinner on the early side, and hoped to get some work done in the remaining hours of the afternoon. I called for the check, and while we waited for it Henry asked whether I would be in New York at Christmastime. I told him that probably I would be away, skiing, but whether or not I was there he was welcome to use my apartment. That was what he had hoped to hear. The house on Dorchester Road had been sold—not that he would have wanted to stay there anyway—and Margot had given up her apartment.

As it happened, I postponed my ski vacation in order to accompany my mother and Greg Richardson to the Pittsfield Town Hall for the civil marriage ceremony that took place, inconveniently, two days after Christmas. Spending Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with them was more than I thought my nerves would bear. The Standishes took me in, and, as soon as I had given my mother away and sat through a lunch at the club—Greg being now a full member—at which there were also no fewer than three Riggs patients, their clinical status as uncertain as Greg’s, I left for New York and the quiet of my apartment. Feeling quite distraught, I was afraid that I would not be glad to see Henry. I was wrong. He understood what I meant when I told him that I wasn’t at the top of my form and stayed clear during the day.