Matters of Honor (5 page)

Stop, I said. I can tell you right now that my parents aren’t rich though they certainly wish they were.

He examined me with an air I took to be skeptical. My mother wouldn’t necessarily believe you. By the way, she thinks you’re very polite in a standoffish Gentile way. Lukewarm, she calls it.

I didn’t know what to say or whether I should say anything. Henry had gotten very flushed and was staring at me. Finding the silence uncomfortable, I told him that I liked my conversations with his mother.

Bullshit, he replied. How could you?

I got up from my armchair and went to the toilet. When I returned he said, Forgive me, I am sorry I got so worked up. Let me try to explain. The current refrain is why don’t I seek out my own kind instead of hanging out with you and Archie and God knows what other high-society Gentiles. For instance, there are some nice services in Boston I could go to on Friday evenings. One of my father’s big customers has a son at Tufts who attends. Go meet him, stay for dinner, and get to know nice Jewish girls. I say to my parents that I’ve never gone to Friday services in my life before, and I don’t see why I should start now, in Boston. You should understand that I don’t think for one minute that my father believes in God. On the other hand with his angina he doesn’t want to say he doesn’t and take chances on what happens after he’s dead. Also, both he and my mother are one hundred percent conventional. Some of my father’s customers go to a synagogue not far from us. So he goes too, on High Holidays, and he and my mother fast on Yom Kippur. To be more precise, they pretend to each other that they’re fasting. I’ve had to go to the synagogue with my father. Each of those expeditions was humiliating. There I was, not because I believed but because I had been dragged. I wouldn’t mind so much if my parents were religious. But my mother, who makes the most fuss, has no religion, unless you accept as a religion the myth about how it was before the war when we were a family of good Jews. I have no memories of our having been good Jews at home in Krakow. Perhaps the war has crowded them out. It doesn’t matter: as I keep telling them, if they had wanted me to be observant, they would have had to be sincerely religious and observant themselves and have provided me with that Jewish home she’s always carrying on about. They aren’t and they didn’t: I’m being badgered to go through the motions of a ritual I don’t believe in. I’ll leave that sort of stuff to the Grand Inquisitor.

The mention of the Karamazovs, whose appearances in his conversation were frequent, cracked me up. All right, he said, what I really mean, and what I tell them when I’m really worked up, is that I can’t seek out my own kind because I don’t know who they are. Maybe there are no such people. I’m not sure that I’m like anybody else. I won’t pretend that I am.

For a moment I pondered the possibility that he was trying to say he might be queer. I didn’t think he was—not just because he was so obviously attracted to girls. I just didn’t think so. At the same time I was reminded once more that he really was a good deal like me, one difference being that his problems were more obvious and could be blamed mostly on being Jewish.

So what do you intend to do about finding out? I asked.

Nothing, he said. Everything. I am going to remake myself in the image I carry inside me.

What that image might be and how it fit with Poland and the scars the war had left were a mystery. My attempts to probe, whether out of curiosity or compassion, got me only so far. The previous day when, having screwed up my courage, I asked him to tell me something about how he and his parents had survived the war was a good example. He had stared at me and said quietly, A nice lady hid my mother and me. A nice man hid my father.

IV

H
ENRY’S
non serviam
did not stand in the way of more conventional attempts at transformation. His principal mentor and accomplice was Archie. Archie’s disgust with the efforts of his mother’s tailor in Panama City endured unabated, as did his conviction that they gave him the “Don Ramón look.” All I need, he said, is a pencil-line mustache. A solution to Archie’s and Henry’s sartorial problems emerged when Archie discovered Keezer’s, a Cambridge establishment rich in university tradition, located in the town-and-gown no-man’s-land between Prescott Street and Central Square. One could buy there on the cheap, among many other props required for an undergraduate’s social ascension, well-cut secondhand tweeds, dinner jackets, and morning coats, often in fine condition. The Keezer brothers’ main suppliers were widows of newly deceased faculty members and alumni. A customer was welcome to trade in his own clothes, which is what Archie did with the Panamanian tailor’s creations. Whatever his view of their cut, the quality was so high that at the end of the transaction Archie owed Keezer’s nothing. It was his plan that Henry engage in the same sort of exchange; his clothes, although off the rack, were also of good quality. Unexpectedly, Henry balked.

I can’t, he said. When I go home, my mother will expect me to wear the clothes she bought for me. I’ll never hear the end of it if I tell her they’ve been sold.

They were at an impasse; without a substantial trade-in credit, Henry couldn’t pay for what Archie had picked out for him. Unwilling to accept defeat, he made Henry a loan, not a large sum, to be repaid over the balance of the school year. They invited me to the final fitting, Keezer’s being expert at even the most improbable alterations. Archie had done well. If clothes made the man, Henry now could pass for an undergraduate who had been to one of the right schools and knew how to dress.

The loan was a sign that Archie was going through one of his flush periods. They didn’t last long, but while they did, a good deal of cash was spent at the liquor store on Mount Auburn Street and at Henri IV, a French restaurant on Winthrop Street in vogue among the faculty and more affluent students as well as parents of undergraduates in Cambridge for the weekend. Archie was fond of rituals. One that he adopted that fall was having lunch on Saturdays at the Henri IV with Clara, a Wellesley freshman from San Salvador with whom he could use his excellent Spanish. It was also where he occasionally entertained a girl from a college in Back Bay known for courses in home economics and students with better bodies than brains. Getting her back to her dormitory by ten or eleven in the evening, the hour by which, depending on the day of the week, she had to be signed in, was easier than getting Clara back to Wellesley. He explained to Henry and me that Clara was very Catholic and brought up in the cult of virginity, so the likelihood of getting beyond what he had already attained—when they kissed she let him put his hand under her Pringle sweater and unhook her bra—was discouragingly small. For instance, Clara refused to go into his bedroom, whether or not Henry and I were around, although, if we weren’t there, being on the sofa in the living room was acceptable. It followed that we stayed clear of the dormitory until the end of parietal hours when Archie brought her over on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. She was also willing to park with Archie, after dark, on quiet Cambridge or Wellesley streets, or along the Charles. The only problem was that Archie didn’t yet own a car. He could borrow one occasionally, but these loans couldn’t be arranged often enough to satisfy him or, perhaps, even Clara, and so hardly accelerated his progress. Jeanie, the girl from the junior college across the river, was also Catholic, and Irish to boot, which lowered her in Archie’s esteem. Disrespect does away with many a barrier to conquest—in addition to acting as an aphrodisiac. On the afternoon of Jeanie’s second visit to our rooms—no suggestion was made that Henry and I withdraw to the Lamont while Archie and Jeanie were behind the closed door of his bedroom—they emerged holding hands, with only a minute or two to spare before girls had to be signed out. I’ve separated the boy from the man, Jeanie announced. Archie signaled assent and hustled her out. Being sensitive to manners and diction, he may have felt embarrassed by the form not to say the simple fact of her declaration, which Henry later told me he had found unbearably sexy. Before long, however, Jeanie’s availability—she thought nothing of coming to Harvard Square by subway, and never insisted that Archie take her back to Beacon Street even late in the evening—trumped the Salvadorean’s well-bred elegance and charm. Archie took to calling Clara only at hours when he knew she wouldn’t be in her dormitory, for instance when she had a class. He would leave a message that he had telephoned. Nothing more. Then he stopped calling her altogether. This tactic confused Clara. She took telephone messages seriously, thought they should be returned, and began calling our room to ask what was wrong. Archie never picked up the receiver; his instinct for avoiding calls he didn’t want to answer was nearly infallible.

Most often, Clara spoke to me. Sometime after Christmas, she invited me to a record dance at Wellesley. She said she was used to being treated gently, and I was gentle. To jump ahead in time, in the spring of that year, Archie became the owner of a four-door black Nash, the most important feature of which was the fold-down front seat that made a fairly comfortable bed. I borrowed the Nash to take Clara to the Wellesley prom. We were leaving when she whispered that she wouldn’t have to sign in at her dormitory by midnight, as the rules required even on that very important occasion. She had told the housemother that she was staying over with a friend in Newton, and had produced the necessary letter from the friend’s parents confirming the invitation. We can be out as late as you like, she said. Then she stuck her tongue in my ear. We drove over to the lake and parked, and I put down the car seat. A little later, she wiggled out of her long strapless pink taffeta dress telling me that otherwise it would be ruined. Before dawn, overcoming my panic, she brought us to a simulacrum of mutual fulfillment. It was, she assured me, without damage to her hymen. That summer, she married the eldest son of a coffee-growing family whose plantation abutted the property of her parents. Through the university administration, she got hold of my home address and sent me an invitation to the wedding mass. Naturally, she did not return to Wellesley, and I was relieved of the need to face future relations.

T
HE TRANSFORMATION
that Archie was undergoing during our freshman year didn’t involve only clothes. He wanted to live up to his Roman numeral, with all its connotations for a connoisseur of American society. Mrs. White was on the right track when she supposed that a young man called Archibald P. Palmer III was likely to have rich parents; both she and Henry showed an instinctive grasp of the lore of American old money. Had Mrs. White learned about the checks that Archie received—irregularly but sometimes in substantial amounts—she would have thought herself proved right. In fact, she was mistaken; the money wasn’t old, and its source wasn’t a family trust. According to Archie, it flowed from his mother’s various unglamorous little businesses, most recently the importation and resale of primitive art and antiquities. Nor was Archie related in any demonstrable way to the grand and wealthy Palmers of Chicago. His middle name was humble: Peters. However, he liked the impression produced by his surname and the enhancing Roman numeral and made no effort to dispel it. Faced with a question on the order of “Is Mrs. Potter Palmer your aunt or cousin?” Archie would laugh and say she was neither. No harm was done. People to whom such things mattered, even undergraduates, were too knowledgeable to take it for granted that someone called Morgan must be connected to the banking house, or that there is only one kind of Rockefeller.

At the same time, Archie did exert himself to make clear to undergraduates he considered useful that, although in a sense he came from nowhere, he should be regarded as their social equal. He simply acted on the English principle that a man may be born a gentleman and remain one even if his material circumstances are depressingly modest and he lacks powerful friends. The latter was certainly Archie’s case. Unlike the men he wanted to emulate, he had no friends at college with whom he had been to grammar and prep school, there had been no shared vacations in Northeast Harbor or Tucson, and no one knew his mother and father. From his point of view, that was an unfortunate consequence of his father’s army career, one that he could and must correct. Accordingly, he believed that as a matter of right he should be asked, at the beginning of our sophomore year, to join one of the final clubs whose quaint buildings on Mount Auburn Street and its vicinity he had inventoried. He wanted to wear a club tie—the right tie, not all clubs being equal. Among the rewards would be getting his name on the lists compiled by social secretaries, which assured one of invitations to coming-out parties, cotillions, and assemblies. Later, it would be entry into the old-boy network and first-class passage to posh Wall Street firms. Though a romantic, Archie was clear-eyed about practical matters: he didn’t shoot for the moon. There were two or three clubs that he realized were simply out of the question however hard he tried. They were also out of reach for all but a few whose fathers, grandfathers, and uncles hadn’t been members. The less grand but still respectable clubs, however, should not shun him. The trick was how to make that understood. The usual route, reminding relatives and upperclassmen with whom you had been at school that you were a freshman and implicitly available, was not open to him. No one outside the British Isles had heard of his boarding school in Scotland, and it probably wasn’t a household name even there. The military academy in Ohio to which he was sent after his father’s posting to the Canal Zone was also obscure. Archie had to fend for himself. Very astutely, he decided to make the most of two of his special skills. In Scotland, he had learned to play rugby—rather effectively, for someone of his slight build. Joining the rugby club, which existed at the fringe of university sports, threw him in with English and Canadian undergraduates and business school students, a number of whom were long on cosmopolitan polish and money. Archie’s other trump card was his near-native Spanish. He liked to use it and did well ferreting out events likely to be attended by Latin American students at the college and at neighboring institutions. In the 1950s, a Latino who had been sent to a New England college or, better yet, boarding school was bound to come from a rich and prominent family. Archie had, in fact, met Clara at a program devoted to Mayan art. But, as he gradually realized, the trouble with his amusing rugby players and Hispanics was that very few of them moved in the provincial society of college clubmen that was Archie’s goal, or indeed gave a fig about it.

A drinking song popular at the time proclaimed that it’s not for knowledge that we came to college but to have fun while we’re here. That summed it up for Archie, if you added useful friendships to fun. Little time or energy remained for course work. I thought that was a pity, because he was so very sharp—as quick, I sometimes thought, as Henry. But while Archie truly didn’t try or care, Henry’s preoccupation was to hide how hard he worked. Those not familiar with his habits were inclined to believe his standard explanation that everything was done at the last minute, in a burst of speed and nighttime cramming. That merely showed how he had adopted, along with all of Archie’s other lessons, the precept that there was nothing less charming than being known as a grind, a disgrace worse than all the detested sky-blue suits or tan flannel jackets in Brooklyn. In reality, Henry worked hard and steadily, but almost in secret and on subjects for which he had a passion. Archie had no such passions and had come to believe in light of Henry’s successes that one could get along very well doing virtually nothing.

How Jeanie was going to fare in his evolving new world was a question that troubled Archie. At first, he believed that she would do fine if she could acquire a certain veneer, by which he meant a repertory of tricks she could perform at his prompting or when her own sense of the circumstances moved her. One day, just before they disappeared into his bedroom, he said to Jeanie, Go ahead, do “Au clair de la lune.” She sang on command, in a pure and self-confident voice, enunciating very well, although she knew no French. When I expressed my admiration, he patted her on the rump and declared that in no time he would have her singing “Auprès de ma blonde” and “La vie en rose.” Indeed, one by one, he added to Jeanie’s curriculum several Piaf and Trenet hits. You can teach her anything, was his judgment.

In common with the rich Latinos, some of the rugby players had knowledge of several languages, experience of luxurious vacations spent in distant locations, and tales of adventures in legendary brothels. They also had startlingly large allowances, beyond anything I had imagined possible for students of their age. Archie’s charm and inventiveness when it came to having fun served him well. He became their mascot and part of a shifting group of debonair figures at after-game cocktail parties, dinners at the Chinese restaurant on Church Street or an Italian restaurant in North Boston, or at the Savoy, listening to Dixieland jazz. Jeanie was indeed a quick study. The men liked her: she was pretty and pleasant, and as she was sleeping with Archie, which defined her status, none of them would have wanted to treat her unkindly. Whether they made passes at her when Archie’s back was turned, and how she responded, were unexplored questions. However, her good nature turned out not to be enough. The contrast with the other girls was too great. It made trouble without a word being said, and perhaps some supercilious, wounding remarks were made. Like the men, these girls were rich, but, unlike them, they were snooty about it. In their company, Jeanie seemed like someone whose mother or grandmother could have been one of their grandmother’s Irish maids, probably of the more refined kind, who could be trusted with delicate washing and ironing. Such may indeed have been her lineage. But Jeanie had a lot of spunk. She didn’t like the position into which she had been thrust and made the break herself. Archie regretted the termination of their sessions in his bedroom. However, to his credit, he made no serious attempt to wheedle her into coming back.