Honorable Men (9 page)

Chip was never tempted to boast of these visits, as would have so many of his contemporaries at Yale. He knew that his need of the girls with whom he had intercourse was a deeper thing in his psyche than in his classmates'. If he kept it from all but the equally damned Peter, might he not create a dichotomy in his life in which at least one aspect, the Yale aspect, the home aspect, would be saved? As the girls on West Seventieth Street were part of his Venusberg, he could dissociate them entirely from love. Love was the great hall in
Tannhäuser
and Elizabeth's prayer; he would never make the mistake of wronging that august presence with a scandalous song. Even when one of the girls at the bar of the brownstone, intrigued by a customer so much younger and more shapely than the broad-bellied brokers, would whisper in his ear that she was available without charge on her day off, he would respond only with a smile and a joke about union rules. He wanted to pay.

Not that it was always so easy to find the money. West Seventieth Street was indeed for the rich. Chip received a large allowance from his father, more than that of even the richest undergraduate from New York, but it was part of Elihu Benedict's parental policy to teach his son to handle obligations as well as privileges by hooking on to the bestowed income the duty to support some poor relations, of whom, as the family fortune was not old, there were a goodly number.

“You are at liberty to blow your income on fast cars and racehorses,” Elihu would tell his son with that amiable smile which belied the implied suspicion. “But if you do, Cousin Cora and Cousin Louise may have to go into a state home. Who knows? Maybe they'd be just as happy there. But
I
am certainly not going to pay their mortgage.”

Chip, of course, was fairly confident that his father would pay the old girls' mortgage if he defaulted, but it was unthinkable that he should ever do so. He found, however, that with a large income, regularly paid, it was not difficult to borrow, and he thrust into the future the ultimate solution of paying for both the demands of his body and the upkeep of his old maid cousins.

As junior year drew to a close, Chip began to think more about the future. He had lived so long and so intensely amid the emotional trauma of the present that he had tended to leave the future to itself. Besides, had it not been arranged for him? He knew that his father expected him to go to law school and then practice for a time in the Wall Street firm that represented the family company. Ultimately he would be president of the company, unless he chose to remain in the law, putting in a brother-in-law as president (if one of his sisters married the right man) and moving himself up to chairman of the board. Surely it behooved him now to consider whether this was what he really wanted. And if he were to discover that he did want it—as well he might—should he not do something first to convince himself that he was not simply drifting into it? That he was Chip as well as Charles Benedict?

Lars Alversen also had doubts as to his own future, and they had long talks at night over many beers in the study that connected their two bedrooms with windows open to the clamor of College Street below.

Lars was not a large and brawny Norseman, as his name might have suggested, but was rather on the diminutive side, with features of a remarkable delicacy and with long, soft, brown hair. His skin was very pale, his cheekbones high, his nose short yet Roman, and his eyes, the color of his hair, bespoke humor and sympathy. For all the fineness of his constitution, there was yet a distinct masculinity to the whole, as if some ancestral Norse warrior had not been left altogether in the past, but would reappear on occasion in his descendant's half-humorous aggressiveness and oddly braying laugh. Lars had considerable charm, of which he appeared to be half-ashamed. He alternated between the pose of being one of the crowd and that of holding himself above it and, finally, he would laugh at both attitudes.

The son of a rich, self-made Boston importer, he had gone to Andover, like many of the leaders of the class, and it was he who had been primarily responsible for detaching Chip from his Saint Luke's group and launching him into the heart of undergraduate affairs. It had taken Chip a little while to figure out his new friend's inconsistencies. Lars would pretend to be a feckless epicurean at afternoon tea at the Elizabethan Club and then stay up all night working at the
News.
It was generally recognized in their group that Chip and Lars's friendship was special.

“You know what they're saying, don't you?” Lars put it to Chip one night. “That you're going to be the last man tapped for Bulldog.”

It was the custom at Yale for the members of the junior class on Tap Day to assemble in the center of the Branford College quadrangle and wait silently until members of the six senior societies, approaching their candidates from behind, would strike them smartly on the shoulder and cry, “Go to your room!” The tappee, glancing around to be sure that he had been bid by a society that he wanted, unless, like most, he was delighted to be tapped for any of the six, would then take off on the double, followed closely by his tapper. In his room he presumably would be sworn into the secret rites of the society behind the windowless walls of which he would spend every Thursday and Saturday evening of his senior year, in the company of the fourteen other members. As Bulldog was the most esteemed of these societies, the last man it tapped was generally conceded to be the foremost man of the class.

“Don't you get sick of all the chatter?” Chip asked impatiently. “Who'll get what? Who'll turn down what, hoping for what? It's all deals and counterdeals. Anyway, I wouldn't want to be in any of them without you. Shall we hold out for Keys?”

“But your old man would expire if you turned down Bulldog!”

“Maybe that's a risk I'll have to take.”

“Of course, it's easier for me, with a father who didn't even go to college. All I have to do is tell him that Keys is better than Bulldog, and he'll swallow it whole. And Mummie doesn't know if they're football teams or New Haven bars.”

Chip had a vision of life as a kind of fluid pudding, with a mother as inane as Lars's. No trumpets, no Last Judgments. Peace. Death. Yet probably better than his own, after all. “But if you were born without burdens, you've been quick to acquire them,” he observed dryly.

“It's true. I'm constantly uneasy that more isn't expected of me. I suppose I really envy you that look in your parents' eyes when they're fixed on you. Of course, one can see through all that misty love to the long line of hurdles they expect you to take.”

“But I'm always aware of the anxiety behind their expectations,” Chip returned, half-surprised at his own sudden illumination. “They don't really think I'll make it. They think I'm going to trip and break my stupid neck!”

“Which would really mean breaking theirs?”

“Ah, you see it too!” cried Chip, striking the arm of his chair. “It's true of their whole damn generation, teachers as well as parents. When Tinker slobbers about the drowning of Shelley, don't you know that he's keeping his good eye on you? He's always afraid you might think he's a ghastly ham and that Percy Bysshe was an ass to go sailing in a storm.”

Lars warmed to the theme. “Because they're all on the defensive. They crawl with paranoia. We must heal the
News,
win the games, sing boola boola and enjoy the golden years. And we must laugh at it all, too, at the same time, because that's the true spirit of Yale. Not snotty detachment like Harvard. The true Eli must tread the delicate line between sophisticated spoofing and maudlin sentimentality. Why? Because anything else is chaos! I think I prefer my old man's attitude. He made his dough and wants to keep it. As long as I don't become a red, he's content. But he's scared shitless that I may become a red.”

“If he only knew how safe he was!”

“Don't be vile. I have my liberal days.”

“Yes, I noticed last summer that you looked rather pained when your father referred to President Roosevelt as a kike and a cripple.”

“All right, Benedict, when did you last ring a tocsin?”

“You know I never have.” Chip sighed bitterly. “But does that have to mean I never will? Suppose I make a stand about Bulldog? Suppose I write a column for the
News
attacking the whole shoddy system of senior societies?” And he suddenly knew that this was exactly what he had to do. Of course! It fitted his need like an inspiration.

Lars whistled; he always caught on when his friend was serious. “That
would
kill your old man. What would you say about the big six?”

“That they enshrine an archaic form of social snobbery.”

“But it will be argued that they're based on merit, on campus accomplishment.”

“Only accomplishment in the Yale tradition. And what is that but a list of the fetishes of the upper middle class? Oh, there's a lot of sentiment and phony idealism mixed up in it. Sure. But when the smoke clears, after Tap Day, you find you have ninety sheep in a safe green pasture and a big rocky field full of goats!”

Lars laughed in his strident way. “We might call it ‘The Sheep and the Goats.' ”

“You mean you'll write it with me?”

“Do you think I'll let you have all the glory?”

“We'll be spat upon! We'll be Shylocks.”

“I wonder. There are an awful lot of goats. I have some of my old man's flare for the stock market. I think I'm going to buy Benedict!”

They stayed up the whole night writing the column, and it appeared in the
News
the following Monday. It created wide interest, but Chip was disappointed to find that very little of the anticipated saliva found its way to him. Lars was right.
The climate of the day was receptive to criticism, even of the most sacred calves. A good many letters came to the
News,
saying that this was an issue that should have been aired long ago, and there was evidence of considerable support among the faculty for the roommates' position. The attacked societies, of course, like royalty, remained serenely aloof, disdainfully silent, although Chip wondered whether the rumor, acutely disagreeable to him, that he had started the whole rumpus to ensure being tapped by Bulldog—posing as an enemy in order to be subdued by incorporation—had not emanated from the society itself.

The only quarter from which he expected a reaction with which he'd seriously have to cope was soon heard from. He and Lars were summoned to drive north to Benedict the following Saturday to lunch with his parents.

“There you are, Lars,” he said, tossing the telegram on his friend's lap. “We're in for it. You can't desert me now.”

Lars had met Chip's parents, but only in New Haven and in Maine; he had never been to Benedict, because, as Chip candidly confessed to him on their drive north that Saturday, he, Chip, had been embarrassed to ask his friends there.

“It's such a company town,” he explained. “Almost every house is occupied by an employee. The hospital and the library were built by Daddy. Everything has that peculiar sanitized neatness of a community ruled by a benevolent despot.”

“Let's be thankful for the benevolent, anyway.”

“Oh, sure. Daddy's reign is just, and his subjects are happy. That's why he never has to raise his voice. But it wasn't always so. Grandpa Benedict, who started the business, and whom I never knew, ran a ruthless sweatshop.”

“How do you know that? Not from your old man, surely?”

“No, Daddy speaks of him as of someone sanctified. Even though I believe he's spent his life consciously rectifying the terrible things his father did. No, it was my cousin Peter Duvinock who told me. He remembers the old boy. A holy terror! He actually fired one of his gardeners for buying a Ford, and when Peter's mother protested that it was the new American thing for every man to own his own car, he called her a Bolshevik!”

They were now in Benedict, and Chip turned off the main road to the steep hill east of the glassworks, where the stylish residences of the company officers, Tudor, Georgian, “Mission Moorish,” rose to the summit in order of the rank of their occupants. At the peak was the big square stone Colonial mansion of Elihu and Matilda.

The beaming butler who opened the front door, a former bank thief, seemed to have no notice of any possible chill in the atmosphere, and his air of unclouded welcome was repeated by Chip's parents in the parlor. They must have agreed at least to start on a conciliatory note.

Elihu Benedict's light blue, kindly eyes gave a dignity and composure to a tall figure and small head that would have been otherwise almost undistinguished.

“Well, you two boys have certainly created a stir,” he told them at the lunch table, with a headshake and a grin. “And maybe it's not such a bad thing at that. You probably regard me as Methuselah, but in my day I caused a good deal of talk by putting up a Jewish friend for my fraternity and keeping at it until he was elected. Once he was in, of course, everyone liked him and realized that they had been the victims of a foolish prejudice. Look at Germany today, and you'll see what kind of thing that can lead to. And as to the senior societies, I'm not sure it isn't a good idea, every now and then, to take a long hard look at even the most basic principles. Should these societies exist at all? Do they pull their weight in the academic community? Well, maybe they do, and maybe they don't.”

“But of course we must remember that the senior societies can't defend themselves,” Chip's mother warned them. “I don't know whether you boys are planning a second piece, but mightn't it be a clever idea to play the devil's advocate and give some of the arguments
for
such institutions?”

Matilda Benedict could never bring herself to take as many chances as her husband. Her innate conservatism made her fear that Chip and his friend might take Elihu too literally. She never trusted a world in which she had had to fight for all the advantages she had so signally achieved. She was as tall and rangy as her husband and so plain that she used to say, in relation to her four beautiful children, that nature had reached a limit with her and had had to turn around.